


Sup From My Mouth

by AtlinMerrick



Category: Anna Karenina (2012), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: But healing much much healing, By fork by hand by mouth, Francisco is Adam from Silence, Hurt/Comfort, I love that so much, Konstantin feeds Francisco, Konstantin is Domhnall from Anna Karenina, M/M, Much much mouth to mouth feeding, kylux adjacent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2020-05-13 13:44:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 43,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19252393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlinMerrick/pseuds/AtlinMerrick
Summary: Dolly Oblonskaya never precisely introduces her old friend to her children’s new tutor, no.Shedoesput one lonely man in a room with the other again and again and again...and to her delight Konstantin Levin and Francisco Garupe take care of the rest.Or, this is the story of how an idealistic young Russian aristocrat helps heal a mourning young Jesuit priest, one very cold Moscow winter.





	1. The First Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [solohux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/solohux/gifts), [Winklepicker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winklepicker/gifts), [tolstayas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tolstayas/gifts).



The Portuguese do not… _glow._

They're dark, the people from whom Father Francisco Garupe comes. Like him, their hair and eyes are brown or black, their skin is too if they're descended from the African people slave traders brought in chains all those centuries ago.

This man though.

Francisco looks back to little Tanya, whose sums he'd been checking, to see if she sees him too, a man with skin so pale he glows and sun in his hair. _Do you see?_

Five-year-old Tanya sees only her sister, who has a finger up each of her own nostrils. Reflexively reaching for Luda's tiny wrists, Francisco glanced again at the man by the fire.

He was gone.

Eyes closed tight, tight, tight then opened again, Francisco wondered if the man was a hallucination. Except…

…except he doesn't have those any more, not really. Garupe sleeps now, he eats. Since coming to the Oblonsky household, to Russia, since leaving Japan, he no longer hears—

"TANYA BLEW HER NOSE ON ME!"

Taking advantage of her tutor's distraction, little Luda had put her fingers up her _sister's_ nostrils. Her sister had retaliated appropriately.

Francisco chuffed out a laugh, blushed, wiping Ludmilla's damp hands with his own cuff. He was meant to teach these rambunctious creatures, show them Christian ways, not get distracted by…by…

…look. Father Garupe isn't a simple man, he is not innocent, nor does he believe any longer in the divine, but if _angel_ is the word for which his mind now reaches, so be it.

And be that as it may, he shrugs the orange-haired vision away, thumbs at a child's hot tear and asks, "Why did Tanya do that do you think?"

Action, reaction. What we do causes others to do something _back._ If a man fails to apostate, for example, dozens die and he himself drowns. If a man _does_ renounce his god, for another example, dozens live, though the man pays for that with his faith.

Luda snuffled and fiddled with her tutor's thumb. "Cause I went and bothered her."

And if we insist on bothering people content in themselves, convinced we have the right, well they may banish Christianity from their country.

Or blow their noses on us.

"Exactly. You did something you shouldn't have done to someone who did not ask you to do it. Bad things happen when we don't respect others."

Ludmilla and Tatiana Stepanova Oblonskaya, four-years-old and five respectively, are too young to understand the whispered sadness in their tutor's voice, they are, however, quite old enough to do something about it.

Which is why Luda does what Luda will do her entire life: anything she likes.

Which is how Francisco Garupe, once a Jesuit priest, prisoner of war, refugee, and now tutor to five Russian children under the age of ten, finds a little girl's fingers in his nostrils.

Somewhere in the depths of the Oblonsky household a fractious baby hears shrieks, giggles, and a man's low laugh and finally settles down for her nap.

*

Months and months from now, after this first afternoon bringing Kostya and Siska together, Dolly will admit her plan did not exactly have the makings of true love.

A solemn young aristocrat who preferred the country? A starved Portuguese priest in mourning? A winter frigid by even Russian standards? No, these weren't the makings of a love story, even in the ponderous-large novels of that famous Tulan.

However, Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya—Dolly to her friends—sees much where some see little and so Dolly believed that these were _exactly_ true love's trappings.

Which is why, two weeks after Father Francisco Garupe came into her busy household, Dolly invited Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin over for tea.

Everything good and right began that day, just like she knew it would.

Take _that_ Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.

*

"—and thank you for coming Kostya." Dolly sipped from her tiny glass. "Stiva's just fallen in love with this port."

"It _is_ very good," Kostya said, warming his hand by the solarium's fire. Dolly was always so kind, Stiva so often away, the house and the children so engaging—when his own house was so quiet—that of course he'd come when Dolly called.

It had _nothing_ to do with curiosity about the children's new tutor, here only four months, of course it didn't.

"—oh he's another one of Dolly's projects!" Stiva'd boomed over their soup bowls last week, signaling the waiter for more wine. "A Portuguese padre. No, no, that's Spain isn't it? Anyway, he's a big handsome chap, all shoulders and cheekbones and hair. Skinnier than you though. Something to do with persecution or religion or something. I don't know, I don't touch the stuff." Stiva slurped his soup.

"Anyway, the children love him. He's teaching them all the important serious things, but he let's them be children too and they always seem to be laughing. _That's_ a good lesson, eh Kostya?" Stiva smacked the table, sloshing soup. "We should laugh more! Which reminds me, I met this delicious young thing at Veslovsky's last week, jolly as…"

Kostya's mind had wandered once Stiva started talking about willing women.

"Ah, the clouds are coming in."

Just as it wandered now when Dolly talked of the weather.

Instead Konstantin Levin—Kostya to his friends—found his attention returning to the little group gathered at the other end of the solarium.

A trinity of Luda and Tanya and the new tutor, the man seemed so much bigger than his tiny charges. Against their lively chatter and bright dresses the pale man looked so very…so very…he seemed so exotically—

"What?"

"—dark Kostya. It's getting dark. I've asked them to bring your carriage round."

Kostya glanced again at the distant table. At shadows hollowing cheeks and eyes and between the bones of a man's hand, at the fall of long black hair to the collar of a black coat. Yes, that was the word, dark. The priest was dark but somehow bright too, like hot coals banked beneath ash.

"What?"

Dolly smiled an I-have-secrets wide. "I said you better escape before the rain."

Careful that she not come between any important…views, Darya Oblonskaya took her friends hand and said, "Stiva's off to St Petersburg soon, won't you come stay with us a little? Six children, nurse, cook, Mr Dogen, myself, and even Stiva's terrible _parrot_ and still the house goes quiet when he's away. Even the baby hates it. We can talk, go for visits in the city, and you can tell me about the farm."

Konstantin nodded and nodded, his mind entirely muddling the words parrot with baby with rain with fire with children with priest, and out of all of that he was left with the image of a dark-haired man sitting at _his_ fire, smiling at him and talking and talking.

"Of course."

With no idea yet that he'd agreed to come live with the Oblonsky family for an entire week, Kostya bolted the rest of his port, coughed, then left.

And _that_ was the first time Dolly put two lonely men into the same room as each other, though it was _not_ going to be the last.

Alas, Kostya didn't make it home before the rain.

—  
_I saw this[moodboard](https://twitter.com/solohuxx/status/1126946424539815936) by Lottie and all I could see was Francisco Garupe's hungry body and it became necessary to write a story where Konstantin Levin feeds him. [Konstantin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFlMuRK3mXU) is Domhnall in "Anna Karenina," [Francisco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeyQrF7XZtI) is Adam in "Silence." I've reversed the lead roles, in that here Francisco has Sebastião's experiences, Sebastião has Francisco's. Mostly I just want to write of healing and love, so, well, there you go. Also? ALSO: Please look at this beautiful drawing of [Siska done by the magical Altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23685532)._


	2. The Second Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fat, naked baby was the squealing reason Konstantin Levin met Father Francisco Garupe for the _second_ time. 
> 
> The third time they met? It was on the tail of the second, and it would be the time that changed _everything._

The second time Francisco Garupe saw Konstantin Levin it was for a few long moments and thanks to a fat, naked baby.

It was like this…

Francisco was standing at a sunny window in the Oblonsky's formal dining room, the only vantage from which he found he could see Tanya, Luda, and little Grisha playing in the snow. Though Father Garupe wasn't the girls' nanny nor little Grigorij's nurse, he still felt responsible for their well-being between lessons on geography and maths and religion.

So he took up sentry at the dining room window, teaching himself Russian between long moments of watching to be sure Tanya kept her gloves on and Grisha's nose didn't start to run.

From this vantage he could also see a carriage pass on the road east of the house. Carriages passed the Oblonsky's rambling home all day but this one draw his attention because it slowed just as the horses passed from view and he understood that they were stopping

Father Francisco Garupe started to pray.

_Shut my eyes, shut my ears, shut my heart, my eyes, my ears, my heart…_

Francisco may no longer believe in the divine kindness of god, but he still believes in good, in Christian values, and so he knew his purpose was still what it has always been—to give body and soul to ease suffering, to bring light to darkness.

It was not for him to want more than what he had—purpose, a second chance to make a difference. It was not for him to turn his face to the sun.

To a man.

He didn't even know if it was Konstantin Levin arrived but Mrs Oblonskaya—"call me Dolly, father, please"—told him to expect him this morning.

The Russian language primer in her hand, the one she'd promise to unearth in the children's rooms, she went and did what she'd been doing for days, as if she'd known him longer than two weeks, she told him things about people, as if he was a friend, one like—

"—Kostya. He really is kindness incarnate though don't tell him I say so because he'll roll his eyes. He truly thinks it's his duty to do what he can for whomever he can and _that_ apparently includes Mr Dogen, who's been ill most of the winter. So the dear man is coming all the way from his farm to take Stiva to the train this evening. Isn't that kind of him, of Kostya?"

Dolly had handed Francisco the primer then and held his gaze and for an absurd moment he'd thought she could see the bright sun of orange hair his mind had conjured, but all she did was smile until he realised she'd asked him a question.

Francisco had nodded his head then, and bowed his head over his primer now, eyes prayed shut, though he couldn't shut his ears and so he heard Mr Oblonsky's shout.

"Ah Kostya, good man, good man. You're just in time to help me choose between the brown boots or the black!"

Francisco heard Mrs Oblonskaya suggest both as the baby shrieked, having his own say.

At no time could Francisco hear a soft-voiced man but he knew Konstantin spoke because even the baby went silent now and again. His pulse in his throat Francisco looked to a white Russian sky. The sun was behind clouds but he was warm now. He was warm.

"Mine!"

It was exactly then Francisco had one single moment to reflect that of Dolly Oblonskaya's six children not one seemed to share her steady, quiet temperament, and another fleeting moment to reflect that it was no wonder she craved the calm friendship of Mr Levin, when suddenly a chubby child ran into the dining room.

Two-year-old Grigorij veered away as soon as he noticed the priest's black-clad legs, then ran to the other side of the gleaming table for twelve, a top hat pressed against a fat belly, and right on out the door again.

Francisco was after the boy like a shot, succeeded in scooping him up seconds later, and smiled when the child gurgled a laugh, as if capture had been his plan all along.

A year from now, when the snows have come again and it is cold in their bed…

…a year from now when his legs are wrapped round Kostya's waist, Francisco will whisper against his lover's mouth, "I used to think the children weren't like Dolly at all but they," he'll say, kissing and kissing. "They're full of plans and matchmaking like their wise mother."

The sun angling low through the window, Kostya will push goose down blankets to the end of their bed and say, "I was sure Grisha would crush my hat but that little rascal is the first time I felt _this."_ Then he'll straddle his Siska's naked hips and press a palm to a broad, bare chest.

Which is exactly what Kostya Levin did now, rounding the corner in pursuit of the naked toddler, running right into Francisco Garupe instead.

Though the priest at that moment was forty pounds lighter than he will be one year from today, he was still a formidable six foot three inch wall, so Kostya's gloved hand shot up to cushion him from the full impact and yes, yes indeed that was the first time Konstantin got himself a handful of what lay beneath the priest's black coat.

He removed his hand instantly, his white face a lovely scarlet to match the priest's, and it was then, right then, _almost_ at that moment that Misters Levin and Garupe had their first words but…House Oblonsky contains six children under the age of ten, a staff of five, and a man who interacts with nearly everyone _at great volume._

“Ludmilla Stepanova put that vodka down now!”

So words right at that moment were not meant to be.

Instead Father Garupe handed Konstantin his top hat by way of filling his arms with a chubby toddler and, as he fled the room toward the sound of shouting, the man the children have nicknamed Siska, heard Kostya murmur softly, "Oh Grisha, you're too precious for beaver, only silk for that little head."

Now, to be fair to Luda Oblonskaya, she'd only been admiring daddy's cut glass bottle _not_ its high-spirited contents, but after he shouted so _loudly_ at her, well it was very natural for her to put her rosebud mouth to the bottle's open top.

Hunched over his open valise, arms full of his favourite moustache waxes, curling rods, and combs, Stiva's parental anger warred with a touch of pride as the four-year-old child held his gaze with a will to make a czarina proud.

Stiva's own two hundred thirty pound frame could not manage as much vodka as his child was tilting toward her lips and so, tumbling an armful of toiletries into his travel bag, Stiva reached out both hands and with a side-ways scuttle toward her, he began wheedling his daughter.

"Now little dochka, my magnificent devochka, daddy…daddy needs that bottle for his trip to St Petersburg. It's uh, it's daddy's _medicine,_ my darling—" Stiva forced a cough, dabbed at his mouth with his fingertips. "—and unless you're daddy that medicine can make you very _sick."_

Luda seemed to think this through, her father still a good dozen feet—and a healthy slug of vodka—away when the bedroom doorway filled with black.

Stiva wilted like an unwaxed moustachio in relief. "Oh Mr Garupe," he whispered, "what magnificent timing."

While Oblonsky slid his eyes toward Luda and the bottle and back again, Francisco was already on his knees, hands held out in supplication.

As much drawn to beauty as her father, Luda turned, she looked at the pretty glow of the priest's blushing cheeks and she placed the vodka bottle in his hands, then wrapped an arm around his neck. She sighed "I'm sorry Siska" against his collar and then Luda left her father's bedroom.

Without letting go of her tutor.

Francisco didn't see Oblonsky's beaming smile of thanks as he followed Luda back to the children's nursery, though it wouldn't have made any difference to his thoughts if he had.

Because Francisco Garupe could not understand his Russian patron. A massive presence in any room, he radiated bonhomie toward all but none so excessively as himself. He committed adultery on his wife, coddled his children to overindulgence, abandoned work to attend parties, and rarely even pretended repentance.

And yet Oblonsky's friends adored him, his children loved him, and his wife looked past his intemperances. Francisco did not yet understand that Oblonsky's great gift was that he accepted in others the same selfish hedonism as he allowed himself.

Then again, to a man whose single intemperance had been screaming Portuguese curses at vicious men until his voice was shredded hoarse, understanding really wouldn't have made much difference.

By the time Stiva was ready to leave for Petersburg, by the time he'd dashed about looking for the waistcoats he "simply must have! The blue one Annabelle, I can't find the—ah thank you" and the silk ties to match, and the boots and hats, it was impossible to take Kostya's smaller carriage to the station, instead they filled the Oblonsky family troika fit to bursting.

The third time the two men met was rather on the tale of the second, and it would be the one that changed everything.

Mostly because one of them was asleep.

*

It was just before midnight and the Oblonsky house was silent. This was usually Dolly's time, where she would settle in to read, write letters, or simply daydream.

Tonight she shared her witching hours with her friend, who had returned far later than they'd expected when a closed bridge meant returning with the troika by a long detour.

"He works too hard," Dolly said, closing the solarium's glass doors where they had both come upon the priest asleep on one of the couches.

Sat with Kostya in Stiva's warm study, she said "When Father Kuznetsov asked if we'd give Father Garupe a home until he returns this spring, of course we said yes. After his ordeal in Japan it would've been cruel to do anything else. Stiva tries to talk religion with him but as you can see he's rather quiet."

Though they're no relation, Konstantin Levin suffers from every single one of Darya Oblonskaya's social maladies. He's long-suffering, anxious to please, kind-hearted to the unkind, and Kostya is partial, he's really quite partial, he is lean-close and tilt-his-head-near partial, to his friend's gossip.

Usually she talks about Countess Lydia or Princess Betsy, those whom she could never hurt with her uncruel tittle-tattles; it's always escaped Kostya that Dolly uses her gossip as a way to get him to chime in, which inevitably means he'll talk about his bees or the farm or the wonders of electricity.

Tonight though.

Tonight he listened because his mind was still too full of what he'd seen.

The priest's long body curled up on a too-short sofa, a book tumbled to the floor, one of his hands unconsciously clutched in his own black hair.

"—I do truly love having him here, Kostya; he is a gentle man and quiet. The few times he's sounded even a little bit stern it's been in defense of the children over whom he worries, when they fall down or when they run into the snow without gloves. Oh! And it's the sweetest thing. If they can't find their own do you know what he does? Father Garupe puts his own gloves on them. Imagine that, he with his big, big hands!"

Dolly Oblonskaya paused a significant number of seconds so that Kostya could, indeed, imagine those hands. Then she sighed.

"I did promise Father Kuznetsov we'd do our very best to help Father Garupe." Dolly scooted her chair closer to the fire and nearer to her friend. Konstantin leaned over his teacup and offered an ear for whispers.

"But Kostya, he eats only enough to do chores we do not ask of him, usually only speaks to us about the lessons for the children. We are a rambunctious household, so busy, so loud and even me, the mother of this brood, is sometimes at wit's end. As much as I love having Father Garupe here, I wonder if here he does not love to be."

Konstantin smiled, familiar with the shouts and squeals of children who called him dyadya, yet as an even dozen moments tick-tocked by, Dolly became still in a way Kostya knew was self-recriminating. His friend always took on burdens not her own. God knew she'd helped him with enough of his own, from the mundanity of a poor crop to his sadness after Kitty chose to end their engagement.

Suddenly Konstantin had a very _good_ idea.

"Maybe the good father just needs a place for meditation, somewhere to regain his strength." It did not take a wise man to see the sharpness of the priest's jaw, the jut of wrist bones when he reached for a child, and always Kostya's heart twisted in sympathy.

Leaning far over his own knees, pale origami coming close, Kostya whispered to Dolly, "Father Garupe doesn't seem much younger or much older than me. We're contemporaries, wouldn't you say? So maybe I could help?"

Dolly was a quiet woman, long-suffering some said. She weighed a bit more than half what her husband did, stood a full foot shorter, but if the silent drip-drop-drip of water was any example, quiet things wear away rocks and move mountains. Dolly knew Kostya was an adept at the language that happened between words, so with her silence she spoke.

Then eventually he did too.

"Dolly, why don't you ask Father Garupe to come live with me?"

—  
_This will update next Monday and yes, like a fool I forgot to mark this as the multi-chaptered fic it so much is, so, in the words of Kylo Ren, who has nothing to do with anything here, "We're not done yet." Please stick around as two lonesome men find some time alone and start to talk—and eat—their way toward love._


	3. Finally

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally and at last, Francisco Garupe and Konstantin Levin speak to one another. 
> 
> Their first conversation goes horribly wrong. 
> 
> Thank god.

Father Francisco Garupe sometimes goes invisible.

Yes, he is six foot three inches tall. Yes, when he joined the Jesuits a seamster was employed to make cassocks to fit his shoulders. And most definitely yes his mouth, his ears, his nose, his _beliefs_ have been big _always,_ and yet Francisco Garupe perfected the art of invisibility by the time he was sixteen years old.

Though perfected is a strong word.

Dolly still saw him this morning of course, ghosting down a corridor at dawn, barely visible in his black on black. Kostya, who had stayed over in Stiva's rooms, noticed him out in the back garden alone, and thought he was trying to enjoy bright winter sun. The children, lazy from the over-excitement of papa's departure, stayed in their nurseries and bothered their toys instead of their tutor.

And so, folding himself upon himself, back bent over thighs, arms wrapped round legs, cheek pillowed harsh on bony knees, the still and silent priest was invisible _enough_ for the entirety of the long morning.

He was also cold.

The sun was bright on last night's fallen snow but the reflected light left him a white sort of blind, not warm. He wore a heavy woolen suit given him by Stepan Oblonsky when he arrived not yet three months ago—with Stiva's belly rounded by good food, drink, and indolence, the priest's three new suits had no longer fit their original owner in any way but height.

And Francisco was cold in the garden, despite the wool.

He wore no fur collar nor hat, like the Russian do, so Francisco squinted against the bright light and hugged his knees harder, and he thought that the garden was flawless in its hills of white. It would look much better later, after the children had marked the snow with play. He knew that under the snow by the bench lay Nikolai's drum though perhaps it was for the best it stay buried, since Vasilisa was partial to _beating_ the thing. Near it Francisco was also sure lay baby Mariya's tiny shoes, which Grigorij treated as adored toys. All of it under a foot of snow that had fallen last night.

So, yes Siska was cold, cold, cold out here in the snow, in Russia, so far from home.

Yet he didn't miss Portugal or the studious life he'd had there. Didn't miss the indulgent heat, the national tendency to nostalgia or, in response to that remembered power, the country's never-ending land scrabble in Africa.

No, Francisco didn't miss Portugal, he missed …having a place. Before his confirmation, before Japan, before his religion became a battering ram used by the powerful, Francisco found peace in Christianity, a mannered, controlled way of _being_ that his over-large body and always-unsettled soul had craved.

The tranquility he found for nearly a dozen years truly began crumbling in Japan, and he'd have thought the last of that serenity turned to ruin when Sebastião died, but apparently there'd been just enough of that peace still lingering that now it was going Siska was sitting out here in winter snow and trying his hardest to disappear.

He couldn't hide from the sun though, could he?

Francisco looked up into the wan, whiteness, side-eyed the sun and frowned, because it insisted on standing in for Konstantin Levin, for his bright red beard and hair, it insisted on making him _warm_ suddenly, when what Francisco wanted was to be chilled to a sluggish indifference.

Good luck with that, father.

Because no matter how hard he tried, his big body perched on top of the low garden wall—the only place protected from last night's falling snow—Francisco's arms and legs and chest, mostly his chest, yes his chest right over his heart, they wouldn't go cold enough to let him forget how warm it felt to have a man's hand there.

Out here in the pristine back garden, Francisco blushed and wrapped his arms tighter around his knees. It didn't do much to prevent his erection, though it did deny it room to grow. He'd learned to do that when he was seventeen, he was good at it by now but…

He didn't want to be.

Father Garupe turned his face toward the house and put his right hand over the spot where briefly a gloved hand had rested and he thought, _I'm tired._

Tired of following rules that others break, tired of wanting and not having, tired of hurting everywhere. Sometimes the hurts were outside, hip bones and elbows bruising too easily because so little flesh protected them now, and sometimes the pain was inside, where that sense of place used to live and was now as barren as this garden.

Francisco sat very still and his fingers were cold, his toes too, and he felt breathy frost gathering in his moustache, but where it mattered most his body insisted on being warm and it _shouldn't_ be. Since Japan he'd failed too many times to believe in a benign god, he'd hoped too hard and had it come to nothing. So he knew for certain that he could never be warmed by a bearded sun despite the feeling in his chest, in his heart, that wanting wasn't the same as having, wasn't the same as right or shared or seen.

Still, something kept trying to blossom inside and so Francisco wanted to stay out in this cold garden until Konstantin Levin went away because if he didn't go invisible, if he went inside, Francisco knew his want would show.

It already had though, hadn't it? He's a pale man, when he blushes Francisco knows he's a mole-dotted beacon. He felt himself go scarlet cheeks to chest when that gloved hand…when Konstantin's hand…when they…

The man some happy young Russian children nicknamed Siska, wrapped his arms tighter around his knees, squinted at the winter sun, and knew, absolutely knew, it was not even half as bright as a man.

*

Invisible shmisible.

The moment Konstantin emerged from Stiva's empty suite he'd…leaned out into the corridor like a bad thief, hoping that by some miracle a priest would appear. When none did, not in the dawn, not in the early morning, not in the _late_ morning, and not even at noon, Kostya went looking for him by pretending he was looking for Dolly.

Fortunately, he found her first.

If he hadn't, if he'd spied Siska in the garden he would have done what he _did_ do ten minute hence: he'd have stood stock still and mentally chattered himself useless.

Fortunately, he found Dolly first, though he immediately tried to sabotage himself.

"I can help."

His friend was dressing her fussing eldest in a new coat—"I can't move mama!"—while her next eldest spun in circles, wearing his sister's outgrown coat over precisely nothing. The Oblonsky children did seem to favour nakedness when possible.

In reflex Kostya reached for seven-year-old Kolya so that he could take the boy off to dress him, but Dolly firmly denied her friend the _escape_ of helping her.

Of course she'd noticed the disappeared priest this morning, but once the children roused themselves from their lassitude, her day busied itself with childish fires needing to be put out, but she would not allow Konstantin this easy self-sabotage.

For easy it was, to bustle about and deny an attraction, to hope against hope someone else would take the burden of _beginning_ from you. She'd done it herself when she'd first found her eyes lingering on Stiva's big body, hoping he'd see her in her dark frocks, with her tidy curls. Yet he'd been blind again and again and so in the end she'd stood right behind him at a dance until he'd literally knocked her over. A year later they married.

It wouldn't be that easy for the good father and her dear friend. In this world it was a hardship for a man to love a man, but not impossible if plausible lies were told. Since she was a girl her uncle has had a "gardener" as part of his staff, one whose gardening duties seem to almost exclusively be wandering around the greenhouses, cutting bouquets for dyadya Gosha, who always looks happier to receive these pretty bunches of Transvaal daisies than any of the fine liquors his brothers bring back from their trips to America.

So when the nurse finally took her four eldest out to skate on the lake, Dolly collected baby Mariya and little Grigorij and under absolutely no pretense whatsoever she went to her room and, just before she closed her door she said as if surprised he was there, "Ah Kostya, how wonderful. Do me a favour please, bring this book to Father Garupe thank you."

She pushed a volume of Pushkin's poetry into Kostya's hand and her door clicked closed loudly.

Right.

Well.

Kostya did as he was told. He did it with literally foot-dragging, and mumbling, and nerves that made him want to—

"—what is that word again?"

A year from today Kostya will smile as Francisco noses gently at the hair behind his ear, loving, he says, how soft the skin is back there, how warm and sweet-smelling. "It's my secret part of you."

Along with all of Konstantin's _other_ secret parts, of course.

"I don't know the Portuguese," Kostya will reply, a year from today. "It…it's…uh, feeling so ill you want to bring your breakfast right back up out of your—"

"Oh! Vomitar!" Siska made clucking sounds, "Did I make my raio sick that day? I'm a terrible man," he'll say, pulling all of their blankets high up, tucking them around his love as if he truly was ill.

"Of course not," Konstantin will whisper, tugging blankets up to Siska's glorious ears and then pulling them over both their heads. Because Kostya loves the smell of them in that bare-naked half-dark, so he took a big breath and said, "You were so beautiful, so perfect, looking at you made me, it made me, oh I was—"

Nervous.

It isn't yet a year from now so Konstantin Levin stood at the French doors leading to the Oblonsky's back garden, clutching a book of poetry and sweating.

_In ecstasy the heart is beating_

It was a line from one of poems in this book he's been standing here half-reading for ten minutes, hoping that maybe just maybe possibly Dolly would suddenly materialise beside him and take the burden of beginning from him. Or, even better, the priest would come inside and then Kostya would have to speak because he has this books of poems to give him from Dolly and yes, yes Pushkin has the right of it doesn't he, the pounding of his heart was an ecstasy, wasn't it?

The sweaty-handed ecstasy of nerves and desire, a hundred things thrumming his heart to fast beating and his hands to clamminess and if he'd just…open…the garden…door Kostya could step outside with a smile and a hello and give the book to a beautiful dark-haired man sitting there, right there, not so very far away, because Father Garupe wanted to learn Russian Dolly said, he learned languages well she said, what better way to do that than with poems about—

_—fire, and tears, and love alive._

"Konstantin Levin."

Kostya wasn't a swearing man but now would have been a very good time to start as he talked to himself in cranky whispers, hissing things like _go Kostya go_ and _he's alone here_ and _it's your job to offer him comfort_ and _for the love of god don't blush_ and _it's easy just pretend he's not pretty_ and—

—well that didn't work, because now of course Kostya closed his eyes and _saw_ pretty. Pretty pale skin, moles scattered over it like the wheat berries he'll throw on the ground come spring, big hands so slow and careful when they lifted Dolly's tiny children. Kostya went and heard a deep laugh when those children were a delight, and oh didn't Father Garupe seem so prepared to be delighted?

What a gift it would be, to be responsible for a man's _delight._

Kostya closed his eyes tighter and imagined a laugh that he had caused, tenderly tickling along Francisco's lean sides, a breathy laugh when he pushed his nose softly into the hair behind Siska's ear.

If he closed his eyes tighter still—and he did—Kostya could _taste_ the smooth skin there, taste the salt of satiation and it was that which reflexively tightened Kostya's fingers round the handle of the door.

It looked like the burden of beginning would be his.

"Gaaaaaah!"  
_"Jesus Cristo merda caralho!"_

"I'm sorry!"  
"Desculpa, desculpa!"

Or maybe the burden would be shared.

—  
_I need these boys to finally fecking talk to one another. And more. Much more. They will next chapter and one of them will take on the raiment of an avenging angel, you just see if he doesn't._


	4. Avenging Angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Francisco wondered why must he trust in old men to tell him god's will? He could hear god's call himself. He was allowed. 
> 
> So, because he's believed all his life in angels, in holy fire and causes just, Francisco Garupe looked straight into the green eyes of a red-haired seraph, and he said, "Yes, yes, yes."
> 
> (P.S. Please look at the artwork for this chapter in the author's notes!)

So badly did Father Francisco Garupe and Konstantin Levin startle each other that the first words said by the priest were a blasphemy, followed by fuck and shit, while the aristocrat threw a book of poetry against the wall and shrieked so loud he woke a baby an entire floor away.

For a long few moments each man contemplated the state of his poor heart and waited to see if he would die. Neither did, though it felt like a close thing.

"Desculpa," whispered Francisco, reaching for but not touching Konstantin, who'd borne the brunt of their bombastic meeting, the bottom of the door meeting his boot before the top resounded against his forehead. "Perdão, oh I'm so sorry so sorry, I didn't see you there I didn't—"

Konstantin Levin lifted his now-empty hands but it wasn't to rub at his smarting forehead, it was to clap them over _peals_ of laughter. He's always been easy to startle, he's always responded dramatically when he was, and he has _always_ laughed like the deranged right after.

And then gone noodle legged.

"Oh!" Siska went down to one knee, then the next as Kostya crumpled with his mirth, big hands still reaching, not touching, guilt a blotchy blush on his white face—until he noticed wintry wind gusting in behind him and that Konstantin's teeth chattered around his laughter.

"Não, no, no," Francisco said to himself, fretting mind going quiet once reflex took over. Then, with the gentility of one whose nature it is to comfort, he wrapped his arm round Konstantin's back and lifted him out of the doorway in which they'd sprawled.

So, here are a few things that happen when one man touches another man like that.

At first, nothing.

Nothing looked like getting out of the way so a door could be closed against the snow blowing onto pretty hardwoods. Nothing looked like remnants of giggling, remnants of guilt, two people still in that liminal state where body and mind are in different places.

Then nothing started to look like something.

And _that_ looked like Francisco brushing a thumb against Konstantin's forehead and the red mark left by the door; it sounded like chesty rumblings of sympathy for the small pain.

Something looked like Kostya dropping his steadying hand from Siska's waist, and it sounded suddenly like _silence,_ like a breath held. Because what he could not see Konstantin now _felt,_ every fragile bone under Siska's stretched-tight skin brailled itself sharp against Kostya's palm.

That's when things changed. Then, right then, right there.

Konstantin Levin's back went straight, his spine turned to iron, and soon, just a week from now, Siska will say it was like a thousand-winged avenging angel suddenly filled that room with its righteous rage.

Because Konstantin Levin was finally tired of things as they are. Of loving the sinner but hating the sin.

Kostya was tired of Stiva's casual adulteries against a woman he claimed, 'understood' his 'needs.' He was tired of aristocratic landlords who felt themselves justified in taking the bodies of their peasants. Kostya was tired of the men who had tutted against Anna Karenina, of the women who complained when Kitty had declined to marry him.

Because Konstantin knew many things: Stiva did not care if Dolly understood his faithlessness, those men would have used Anna just as poorly, and the tutting women had not one bit of Kitty's kindness.

No, not one shred of her sweetness when Kitty held his hands just weeks before they were to wed, whispering soft against his tear-stained cheek. "I know you love me my love, but not the way we both wish you did. My dearest and kindest friend, I love you far too much to watch you treat your heart with cruelty. You tell them all I'm fickle, tell them I'm cruel, tell them I was always too young to be a good wife to you. No no no, I'll do all of that. You though, my Kostya, you do this for me please: find your true love out there somewhere, find him and love him as you would have tried so hard to love me."

In the words of the man who would be his love, in the words Francisco would teach him, Konstantin knew that the world was full of lazy demons, men and women of privilege who had never had to care too very much about too many things and as of this moment, here in a child-quiet house, Konstantin was tired of it. Tired of deviltry masking itself as virtue, so very tired of suffering, and yes, absolutely yes he steadied himself now on legs so recently laugh-weak and in so doing felt delicate bone and therefore hunger and he was done at last. So, like an angel—

"No!" Siska will sigh, "Like an _archangel,_ the chief of hosts, a warrior with wings covered in eyes that have seen and seen and seen so much!"

—Konstantin flexed a hand still tender with memory, and he said, "I need you father. I need you to help me. Come to my farm, to my house, to me. Help me understand how to change the world."

Those were the words Francisco heard, but here is what he saw: In Kostya's eyes he saw himself _seen._ Saw that this aristocrat about whom Dolly has said so many things—"he gives his people a just share of every crop; when they marry there are dowries for the women, tools for the men, blessings to work a half dozen acres of their own"—was saying clear as day, _You Francisco, I want to change your world for something kinder. Will you let me?_

Once he'd entered the Oblonsky household Father Garupe had been certain he would stay so long as its matron wished him there. The church had always taught him that he must go where god called and after Japan, after Father Kuznetsov's order had brought him here, Francisco accepted that Russia was where god willed him. He'd already imagined himself saying prayers over the infant heads of Vasilisa's or Nikolai's children, offering blessing for Tatiana's and Ludmilla's marriages.

Yet why must he trust in old men to tell him god's will? _He_ could hear god's call himself. He was allowed.

So Francisco nodded _yes yes yes,_ but said nothing because though he's believed all his life in angels, in holy fire and causes just, he was a little overwhelmed looking straight into the green eyes of the seraph looking right back at him.

Then the orange-haired angel reached out both hands. "To my friends I am Kostya."

Francisco Garupe reached back, his chilly fingers surrounded by Kostya's warmth. "I'm…Francisco. All Dolly's little ones, they call me Siska."

*

Somewhere one floor away a woman booped a baby on her nose and the baby laughed. The rambling old mansion in which they both live is large and sturdy, has stood for hundreds of years against Russian winters and Russian wars, so of course Dolly couldn't hear two lives changing a single floor below, no, but like any rare creature who listens more than they talk, Dolly's learned the language of silence.

Scooping Masha up into her arms Dolly looked at little Grisha asleep on her bed and said to him, "We're not needed here now my darling deti. What do you say to a holiday while daddy is gone? We'll go to Sochi I think, we'll go see our dearest Anna. Ssshhhh, remember little love, we don't tell anyone where she is."

Grisha's sleeping silence was all the agreement she needed. Content with her new plan, Dolly kissed baby Masha's nose and danced her around the room, whispering in her ear, "Let them go to hell darling, all the silly boys who would tell you who to be. But be kind to the boys who are kind to you. And the girls, too my love, the girls too."

Dolly waltzed her little one to the window and looked out at sun sparking the snow bright and said, "Speaking of which, why don't we see if Auntie Kitty will come along? Let's ask her my little love, what do you say?"

Baby Masha cooed.

_—  
I read a [wonderful fan fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11463972/chapters/25702044) where Anna Karenina faked her own death beneath that train and disappeared, to be joined later by Kitty. That's the canon I'm going with here. Then my recent exposure to all the wonderful Good Omens' artwork reminded me of the biblical descriptions of angels, so of course Francisco sees these in Kostya—AND THERE IS [**ARTWORK for Seraph Kostya**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23636137)! Thank you so, so, so much Altocello (he's even got wings and a halo)! Finally, Konstantin's startle response is mine. I shout, I throw things reflexively, then I descend into spaghetti-legged hysterics. Every. Time. P.S. Thank you Winklepicker and DaisyChainz for your endlessly kind words._


	5. Green and Gold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the thing you want to know about two white-skinned men flirting. Their flesh talks for them even when they are coy or shy or scared. 
> 
> So every sweet, sweet blush is a beacon saying… _I mean what you think I mean._

Father Francisco Garupe tiptoed, a shadow among shadows, silent and slow.

The apples never saw him coming.

He broke into giggles in the quiet attic. "Homem louco," he whispered to himself, for crazy man he was, sneaking where he was welcome, silent when he'd been encouraged by Konstantin to be—

"—yourself Father."

"Siska."

A blush and smile, a glance at his shoes. "Siska," said carefully, as if tasting something delicious, then solemn green eyes met Francisco's again. "However you are, please be that here. Every cupboard, book, or bottle, it's yours to explore and find what you need. I'll be back soon."

Konstantin vanished from his own home then, not five minutes after they'd arrived.

Francisco had meant to wait for him patiently in a fine scroll-work chair at a large wooden dinner table but, like Konstantin, no sooner had his body arrived than he was in motion again, darned the air with his nose, following a scent that wouldn't let him sit.

He went quietly, though Kostya had said the house was empty. Still there was something of the solemn to this house, to all Russian houses with their wood beams and wood walls and wood furniture, so unlike Portuguese homes with bright tile and terra cotta.

So Siska tip-toed his big body from room to room, sniffing the air and finding here…ah, the fatty smell of wax, the culprit a trio of inexpensive candles burned low despite being surrounded by one, two, three hurricane lamps. The lamps and the candles sat on a desk piled high with books, papers, a half-empty glass that smelled of sweet port.

Like a very tall child, Siska looked around the empty room furtively. Utterly alone in the quiet but for dust motes transfixed by low summer sun, the priest picked up that glass and put his big nose into it, telling himself he just wanted to smell what was inside, nothing more.

Except the desk, with its clutter and candles and lamps was Kostya's desk, he knew. Scattered post bore his name and so this was his wine, it had touched his mouth.

Siska's cheeks winged up scarlet and he put his lips to the edge of the glass and he'll confess to Kostya later, as if to his own personal priest, that he _licked_ the rim of the small glass, absolutely all the way around it, so that wherever Kostya's mouth had fallen, whatever whisper of spit or butter had been on his lips, Siska now had a little bit of that inside him.

Still blushing like a boy but bold as anything Siska sipped the port, let the sweet syrup of it trickle over his tongue and under, down the back of his throat and into his belly. Now Kostya was part of him, more true than any transubstantiation.

"Shhhh." Shushing absolutely no one, Francisco grinned and put the glass down right where he'd found it, studied carefully to make sure it looked precisely the same, then he licked his lips _one, two, three_ times to be sure he had everything. His gaze danced around the room guilty-not-guilty and brass fittings on wood boxes along the walls winked cheeky at him, as if to say _we saw Siska, we saw and will say nothing._

So help him Siska smiled wider, showing teeth, and nodded. Then tip-toed on.

Because despite the smell of wax, wine, dust, there was beneath it the scent that started this, a sweet and lingering smell of apples.

The house was so large for one man but Francisco didn't wonder that his host, though thirty-five-years-old, hadn't married and filled it with children. Francisco became a priest for the same reason Kostya hadn't married, though he never told anyone, not ever, not even poor Sebastião when they had had nothing but long nights of waiting in the dark to divert them.

_There._

The scent tickled his nose and so Siska moved faster through the house, each room—unlike Kostya's ramshackle desk—feeling as if they'd been that way for generations. This bench placed there by a great grandfather, that vase by a long ago housekeeper, this oil lamp by an ancient aunt whose eyes were failing.

He touched nothing else until he ghosted himself to a closed door. The sweetness was stronger here. He opened the door to the foot of a spiral staircase.

_Here._

The scent washed down the stairs like waves, making his jaw ache imagining that tartness in his mouth. After the first weeks of hunger in Japan, imagining food didn't soothe the belly ache, it didn't distract.

Now was not then though, so Francisco stood awhile and looked up toward a low door, and imagined what he'd find there. Would they be red apples, dark as blood? Would they be green and fresh as sap? Maybe they'd be those rare yellow ones he could find only late in a Portuguese summer.

Suddenly Siska wished he'd found an apple on Kostya's desk. Something half-eaten. A core abandoned that would never be missed.

He blushed some more and rolled his eyes to heaven, making _you idiot_ mouth noise at himself. He was thirty-six-years-old with, apparently, the confused and breathless libido of a boy. He _tsk-tsked_ though he was grinning, walked up and up the creaking steps, until he finally stood in the attic doorway.

There they were, dozens and dozens of them sitting on straw, fat and green, small and gold, apple beside apple beside apple. On chilly window ledges and empty book shelves, fresh as if they'd just been picked, safe from the freezing temperatures outside.

Francisco saw now open scrollwork along the far wall. "Ah," he murmured, that's what let the air from the attic flow out, and the air from the lower rooms flow in. No wonder the smell of apples filled the house.

The priest tip-toed into the room, shadow in shadows, silent and slow and then—

"Homem louco!" he laughed at himself, creeping up on apples and straw and dust. Impulsively he snatched an apple up, a sun-yellow one, then sat on the small bed tucked under the low eaves, apple cupped in his hands and held to his nose so he could breathe.

Through the open scrollwork behind him he could hear two clocks tick out of time down below.

Tick tick…tock.

Tick tick…tock.

And just like that it was the sound of the rain falling from the tall grass in Nagasaki. _Drip drip…drip._

It was black-tailed gulls calling over Tomogi. _Caw caw…caw._

It was most of all the sound of Sebastião worrying the rosary round his wrist when fear and doubt wouldn't let him sleep. Francisco would let the soft sound of fretting lull him. _Click click…click._

Tick tick…tock.

Reveries, trances, delusions…Francisco knows they're kin. The first was a devout mind given over to meditation, the second always seemed to him a secular trick, the third is for Siska the most sacred because delusion takes away the torture from _time._ A man can hide from hunger and pain inside delusion, go somewhere far away while he waits and waits for the pain to be over.

 _"Ah."_ Francisco took a sharp breath as the two clocks below struck three, one behind the other. "Aaah," he sighed, blinking himself awake to the sight of wooden ceiling beams, then the scrollwork beside him. He wasn't in Japan any more no, he wasn't afraid any more no, and he was…

…not alone.

Siska turned his head to see Kostya motionless at the doorway, as if his stillness would make him invisible. Siska smiled as Kostya started stuttering. "I…there was…I-I'm sorr—"

It was natural as faith for Siska to hold out the apple.

Kostya blinked at the small yellow thing cupped in the priest's palm, then at the priest himself curled on the bed. It was natural as breathing to go to his knees beside it.

Kostya took the fruit and said, "Knowledge."

Francisco smiled and sat up. "I forgot that the Orthodox way is to focus on salvation, not sin."

Siska touched the apple and of course his boyish brain thought gleefully _we're touching the same thing, his hand and mine._ Siska blushed and told that apple, their hands, "My people talk about hurt. Christ's suffering and death and original sin, but you wonderful Russians build your faith around healing."

And because he wanted Konstantin to talk—about sin or faith or apples _—_ he asked, "What knowledge does this apple have for you?"

Warriors aren't made sudden like. It takes a little time to learn how to wield a flaming sword or to fit comfortable into the fury of righteousness. So for a teeny tiny few seconds— _tick tick…tock—_ Kostya was awkward and shy and wasn't sure what to say or how to say it if he knew.

Then his gaze went from Francisco's long fingers so close to his, up to the cuff of his dark coat. That cuff didn't reach far enough because big as Stiva is, Siska's bigger still, so his wrist jut from the edge of that cuff, showing the obscene swell of bone there, and Konstantin Levin felt the unfamiliar mantel of warrior settle a little more comfortably on his shoulders.

"Not knowledge of serpents or angels or banishment. You're right, we're taught more about the mysteries of god and the divine, but I don't think we think enough on how we can create divinity ourselves. That what matters is how a man like me treats." Kostya pressed his lips together but it didn't stop his face going red. "Another man."

They are in a quiet house and though Francisco doesn't know it yet they won't be disturbed; Konstantin had spent the last two hours cajole-bickering with his housekeeper to make sure of that.

Even though Siska didn't know this yet, he did know they were in an attic and since people have made such places those places have held secrets.

So Siska leaned over his legs, toward two hands which still together held that apple and he asked in the whisper of secrets, "How does that man treat another man?"

Here's the thing you want to know about two white-skinned men flirting. Their flesh talks for them even when _they_ are coy or shy or scared. So every blush is a beacon saying _I mean what you think I mean._

Tick tick…tock.

Tick tick…tock.

Kostya let the apple slip through his fingers. It thumped softly and rolled away under the bed. He cupped Siska's hand in both of his, bought it to his mouth, and kissed his palm, one, two, three times.

On his knees before a priest this moment could still, it very much could still be some religious rite, a penance or offering, there was plausible denial available if denial they needed.

But when Siska slid from that bed to _his_ knees, too, when he folded his long body small until he'd tucked himself against Kostya, arms round his waist, face pressed into his fiery hair, and felt slim arms wrap around his back—angel wings, for Siska those arms will forever be skinny angel wings—these actions removed any doubt as to what this was.

And what it was was this: the burden of beginning being shared, once more. A burden neither of them would ever have to lift with one another again.

"Siska," Kostya said against black hair he imagined was still warm from the rest found in one of his beds, "Siska, will you come downstairs? I have something for you."

 **—  
**_Sometimes it feels like characters are breathing themselves to life and that's what I think Kostya and Siska are doing for me. Thank you Winklepicker for loving these boys as much as I do and for sharing your knowledge; it made_ such _a difference to this chapter! Pssst, I've now dedicated this story to you, too._


	6. Butter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Konstantin held a butter-slick dumpling in his hand, full of potato and cheese and mushroom and touched it to Francisco's lips. Like the largest and most beautiful of birds the priest opened his mouth and Kostya laughed because beauty will do that to a man, it's either that or tears.
> 
> This was no time for tears.

Konstantin tip-toed, too.

Francisco wondered if perhaps there was a secret something in Russia that made two grown men tread steep steps on their toes. The thought made him giggle, a huff of breath quickly muted with his hand.

He hadn't laughed since, oh maybe since Magda and Liliana saw him in Belém. Always when his sisters couldn't make him giggle with their antics—"you're too serious now, Kiko!"—they tickled. What would they think of his laughter now, of his willful tongue licking against his own still-tingling palm?

"Here," Kostya turned, took Francisco's hand and put his own over the priest's head. "The lintel is low," he said, though he didn't let go even when Siska stepped through.

No, Konstantin Levin kept hold of the fingers of Siska's hand, chattering the silence busy. "I used to bang my head there when I was a boy. I'd run, run, run up the stairs after something my mother wanted, I'd fly down them, then when I was fourteen I seemed to get tall overnight and it was like every part of me was borrowed from someone else. I'd hit my head on doorways and swing my limbs into walls and did that happen to you Fath—Francisco? Did you-did you grow tall suddenly, too?"

They'd come to a stop in the middle of the dining room, beside Siska's bag and it was then Konstantin realised he was still holding the priest's fingertips. He bowed a little, placed his hand carefully at Francisco's side. "I talk. Too much sometimes. When it's quiet. When I'm alone. When I'm…"

_Nervous._

Kostya laughed, nervous, and stepped back. Francisco a little bit wondered which of the angels Kostya was now, the mighty seraph of the attic was tucked away for now, perhaps an archangel had taken his place. Siska wanted to say something about that, but then Kostya gestured at his small bag, just the one, and an overlarge coat and hat given to him by Dolly. "Stiva has so many clothes and wears only half," she'd said, "I promise he won't miss these."

Kostya spoke to that hat and coat, draped over Siska's case. "I was thinking which room you might like, whether you would want to be upstairs or downstairs. It's warmer upstairs but it's brighter downstairs and you would have some privacy as my room is upstairs but you don't have to decide right now because there's time before bed and even afterward of course because you can change if you're not comfortable and I. I'm talking too much again. You must be hungry Fath—Siska. It's getting late isn't it, the sun's over the horizon."

Kostya stepped up, took Siska's hand—just the fingertips once more—and he stepped sideways, tip-toeing again, around the dining table, through the sitting room, and into a large, tidy kitchen made intimate by early evening shadows.

"Agafya insisted I bring home food." Kostya said, explaining the laden farm table in the middle of the room, then pointed east with his chin. "That rise over there, do you see the smoke? That's where she lives. Agafya was my nurse when I was little and keeps house for me now. I knew she'd have seen the carriage arrive back sooner from the Oblonskys than expected so I went to tell her I would be busy awhile so that she, uh, so that—" Kostya blushed. "—so she wouldn't come."

Konstantin let go of Francisco's hand as if caught putting it somewhere he ought not, spun toward the high table and quick-smart plucked a broad deep bowl covered by a shallow bowl from the midst of half a dozen more. "She sent me home with so much. It turned into an argument. It was the only way she would let me leave. I'm grateful, of course, I don't meant to sound as if I'm—I'm talking again, I'm sorry it's time for supper don't you think, while the food is still warm."

Kostya blink-blinked at the silent priest and then sat down suddenly, the bowl on his knees, gaze there too, and even in the low light it was easy to see his face go even more red. He felt unsure and stupid, out of place in his own house. They had held one another not five minutes ago but it felt like something he'd imagined, a secret moment glimpsed through someone else's window.

"I want to help," he said to the solyanka jiggling on his knees. "I mean to help Fath—Sis—oh! I meant to ask weeks ago! Is there something else I should call you? I don't know if you really _want_ the name the children gave you, I meant to ask and I never did and I—"

For the second time that day Siska went to his knees. Kostya stopped talking as if a hand had been put over his mouth instead of two warm ones placed either side of his. His fidgets fell away and his blush went further, up to his bright hair, down into his collar. He almost laughed hysterically, because he could feel his nipples going tight, but he didn't laugh because the father was talking, his hands over Kostya's, his hands warm and still.

"My avó, she still calls me Francisquinho. It means little Francisco." The priest shuffled closer so he could sit back on his haunches and be…littler. "I didn't realise I was big for a long time because she has always called me little so no, I didn't know for a long time that I was especially big, isn't that strange? My sisters, they're tall as me and since I was a baby they, my whole family really, have called me Kiko." Francisco tilted his head but couldn't see through the fall of red hair.

"And you Kostya? You'll call me Siska, yes?"

_Tick tick…tock._

The clocks, unheard for so long, made themselves suddenly loud. Maybe that was their purpose, to signal the important moments, the momentous ones. That is what Francisco will say not too very many days from now, listening to the sound of those clocks while he presses his mouth to the pulse in Kostya's throat.

Konstantin Levin lifted his chin, high, higher, long hair falling away from green eyes and ever since Siska was very small, so small his grandmother's nickname for him did not yet make people laugh, Francisco Garupe's loved angels. That love might have come _from_ his grandmother, his avó, but he alone grew it into a devotion, wiling away hot Lisbon afternoons drawing six-winged seraphim, and hovering dominions with their scepters. Staring at clouds he imagined angels in all their religious glories, Judaic and Islamic and Christian. So Father Francisco might be excused for devotedly seeing the beatific in Kostya's beautiful face, though surely anyone, absolutely _anyone_ could see Kostya's spine going straight and his gaze clearing. Remembering, so obviously and clearly remembering the purpose he'd given himself.

 _To_ _change the world._

By changing the world for this man.

Francisco was about to help with that.

"You," he said conversationally "are wearing…soup."

They both looked at Kostya's knees, tan trousers jiggle-speckled now with red.

Siska cupped one of Kostya's hands, lifted it from the side of the bowl, and exposed the palm wet with broth. And with the ease of instinct, Siska licked it.

If things hadn't gone as they did, the boldness of that intimacy would've provided the priest much with which to self-flagellate later, but things went _right_ instead of wrong so that sorrow would never be his, never theirs.

Instead the path stretched out bright and clear as a summer sunbeam and the man who not one time had answered Kostya's question about hunger, well, here he showed how they'd both be fed.

Separating his fingers so Siska could lick between them, Konstantin's nipples were— _suka blyat!—_ now so hard they _hurt._

He huffed a giggle, a tiny one, then when Siska kept, kept, when he kept _licking,_ Kostya giggled again only louder, sensation fizzing out of his body in glee and grins and—

He took his hand back careful-quick and just long enough to put that soup bowl onto the table, then held his hands out, both the one wet with Siska's spit and the other with soup and Francisco laughed his face right into those cupped hands, pressed his cheeks and nose into the half-mess, then followed the tug of Kostya's hands, stood tall on his knees and waited for licking, he did, he waited for Kostya's tongue over his cheeks and chin but he didn't _get_ that, not then, because he'd pointed the way for his seraph, his prince of princes, so Kostya knew how these devotions should go.

Wiping the thick soup away from the priest's face he presented his palm again, so again Francisco _licked_ him clean and in the quiet they both heard Siska's belly groooooan for more of this meager fare.

Well.

_Well._

Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, already Francisco's angel, was about to become his religion—though there would be moments of doubt, one coming very soon—his highest of high, holiest of holies, when Kostya took back both hands, gently, careful, with fingers tap-tapping over Siska's chin and cheeks and mouth, turned to the laden table and flicked his gaze over bowl and plate and bread and— _there._

Kostya stood, pulled Francisco to his feet only to sit him down where he himself had been and he pushed a plate off a bowl until it clattered the kitchen noisy, and he followed it with his own clamour.

"Vareniki," he said, holding a butter-slick dumpling in his hand, full of potato and cheese and mushroom he touched Siska's lips and like the largest and most beautiful of birds the priest opened his mouth and Kostya laughed because beauty will do that to a man, it's either that or tears. So Kostya laughed for the beauty and pressed the dumplings against Siska's bottom teeth, grunting as he did, demanding _bite_ and so Francisco bit and chewed, but not fast enough for Konstantin who nodded him to speed, then popped the rest of the dumpling into Siska's mouth the moment he opened it.

Empty hands cupped the priest's chin, a demand to stay put, to be good, to take what he was given.

Though aching thin, Siska was a large man, shoulder and chest and leg, but he had chosen all his adult life to be a power subservient. Maybe he needed help to carry that great body through the world, maybe that was why he wanted to follow the scriptural demands of god that he use that body to baptise, to prothletise, but then…then came Japan and there was misery beyond miseries, men and women he had baptised with his own hands, drowned, there'd been death and disillusionment and starvation but there hadn't been _less need_ in him. To be directed, helpful and helped, to _obey._

Siska took what he was given, a dumpling on his tongue, he chewed and swallowed and opened his wide mouth wide to show it was empty. Then he grinned with teeth and obediently he waited.

Another dumpling. Another. The reward each time was greasy hands cupping his chin, of green eyes watching his mouth, or it was a pink tongue pushing against teeth and then lips that are _fat_ Siska thinks. They are _fat_ and shining and red.

Siska went still and stared at that luscious mouth at the same time Kostya's thumbs stroked red cheekbones, so very high in Francisco's face, the skin so tight there that Konstantin slowed himself to gentleness, imagining a future when he would not see this face _this_ way.

They were close enough to breathe in each other's breath. Close enough for kissing.

But they didn't.

Tip-toeing, they do that, these two large men, have done for years. One to half-hide his big self, the other to tame his exuberance, and though their reasons are different they've both learned how to go slow, tread careful, so they do that now even as they break almost every rule each knows for how a man should treat a man, still they are a little bit, a tiny bit, breathlessly _careful._

So Siska didn't kiss him though Kostya kept opening his mouth as if waiting for it to be filled with buttery exhales, and his tongue kept poking out as if wanting to poke _in._

And no, nope, Konstantin didn't kiss though Francisco's mouth was, literally, an open invitation, wide and waiting for anything that Kostya wanted to place inside.

It got dark, because that's what the day does.

Thank heaven for that because without the last of the light fading they might be in that kitchen still, motionless as icons for a religion they themselves were creating, worshipping one another surrounded by the scent of butter and broth and _breath._

Except it became impossible when Kostya had to squint and Siska was peering down his nose and in that kitchen silent as a cathedral they both started to laugh, then laugh _loud,_ and finally Kostya bustled away, muttering "Lamps, lamps, lamps" a chant as he lit one and two, then a half dozen, flames dancing high and wild, then low and steady.

They could have been a denial, those lamps. _Here we are back in the light, seen and so_ we'll be good, we'll be _righteous._

Those lamps weren't a denial though, they were what they were—a way to see each other, see their knees pressed against each other, sitting at the corner of the farm table. See Kostya putting—"too much! too much!"—butter on bread and then holding it to Siska's laughing mouth until he took a big bite anyway.

He doesn't know it yet, but there will be butter in Francisco's coffee come morning, there will be melted butter and honey on his bread tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that, there will be butter on top of already-buttery tea cakes and sushki dipped in sugared butter and then swallowed down with sweetened tea.

There will be butter…soon for Siska there will be butter and butter and _butter_ on Kostya's mouth, his belly, his cock.

But not yet.

Four vareniki, a half slice of bread with so much butter, then two white hands fluttering over the abundance, what else could he pluck up and place _in,_ there was so much food to feed him, but Siska put a hand on Kostya's wrist and said "enough," because right now it was.

Besides, you can't put forty-plus pounds on a man overnight, however much you know it belongs on the architecture of those vast bones, so Kostya nodded and waited and was rewarded. Francisco asked for wine.

"Sweet," he said, licking away remembered syrup. "Sweet wine?"

Konstantin slid from his chair so fast he tipped forward, rescued himself with hands on Siska's knees, then laughed himself around the room, going to a cupboard but turning away from it toward another, then a third, where he found the small glasses he wanted, then out of the room through one door and back again and out the one opposite, then back almost as quick with a bottle in his hand.

He stopped a half dozen feet from Francisco and took a deep breath. "Fire," he said, and flit right back out of the room, this time Siska following him to a small room behind the stairs to the attic.

It was nothing like the conservatory in Dolly's house, that wide room with its iron ribs and thick glass, but it held a fireplace big like that one and Konstantin set to poking the coals, finding a few still banked warm. He added twigs and wood until the flames took and then turned two fat, upholstered chairs toward the fire, grabbed hold of the tails of his coat, and sat down suddenly.

Grinning Siska said, "wings," because he needs and wants and will see that in Konstantin, who was looking up, so Siska sat down. He took the glass of sweet wine offered him and, because it was his turn to do and say and be brave, he said, "Shall I tell you what an angel looks like?"

Konstantin Levin leaned toward Francisco Garupe, close enough to feel his breath.

"Please."

_—  
I love, love, love the diminutive Kiko for Francisco, found [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name), while here are the hierarchy of [angels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_angels). I am bringing these boys fast as they'll let me toward their intimacy, thank you for tip-toeing along with them. _


	7. A Loud Quiet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the loud quiet of Konstantin Levin’s house, a river changes course…

As if he also had a long coat to settle about him, instead of a hand-me-down too short in the wrist, Francisco Garupe wriggled in his chair, adjusting his hem.

Afterward, he reached for the small glass of wine he'd put down on the lip of the raised hearth, turning it until he found the tiny bead of syrupy wine at the edge, showing where he'd sipped previously.

Once he knew the place to place his mouth, Francisco was ready to again speak of angels, having long since learned it's best to talk of the sublime, not necessarily of faith. People rarely share a religion just so, but one and all we share awe, worship grandeur, want to believe in goodness.

Yet in the end Siska didn't talk of goodness, and the reason for that is this: Russia in winter is _cold._ Temperatures might be minus twenty degrees centigrade and so large, old homes—like the one in which Konstantin Levin has always lived—have fireplaces big enough to take a lot of wood.

While most of the cords behind the stables were made of logs small enough for a child to manage, Kostya, like every landowner, made use of fallen tree limbs too, and often these logs are left long, some barely halved before burning.

So when the knots in a four-foot log exploded like gunshots almost simultaneously— _crack crack…boom!_ —Konstantin jumped only a little. Didn't even spill a drop of his wine.

Francisco though. Francisco froze, brain, breath, and body.

For three tick-tick-ticks of the clock absolutely nothing shifted inside his head. Then those terrible moments passed and what came after was _worse._

Blood cold, heart thrumming, the edges of his vision blurry and flat, Siska carefully placed his wine glass down on the floor beside his chair because the hearth? It was so much further away now. If he leaned over his legs and tried to reach it he never would, and even if he _could,_ he'd be out in the open then, all the inches of him so easy to see.

So Francisco didn't do that, no. Instead he moved slowly, he put the glass on the floor beside his foot, and because panic doesn't have rules—a man might sweat or freeze, he might feel pain or utterly detached—Siska stood up in that room gone flat and far away and on feet he couldn't feel, Siska followed the panic out, away, into the darkness of the house.

He tripped over nothing, his head full of cotton, light and terrible with wooziness, seasick. He remembered seagulls wheeling in a bright sky and tried to not remember their caw. He'd never like the sound of them again, he knew that, because seagulls sound like they're laughing and that day, that day it happened and he watched it, he reflexively looked up, up, up at the chattering flock circling over the boat as guards pushed one, two, three, four Christians into the water…as Sebastião swam out to them…and he'd tried to shriek louder than the laughing gulls, than the waves _smacking_ against the sides of the boat like gunshots, but he heard everything anyway.

Stumbling, tripping, grunting half blind from one unfamiliar room to another, Francisco's hands hit the back of a chair here, his hip or his thigh the corner of a desk there. Tomorrow his fragile skin will be purple with bruises but before Japan he's sure he was never so delicate, so easily broken, but he _is_ now, they broke him, he'll never be whole or worthy or—

"Hmmm, hmmmm, _mmmmmm."_

Fingers spidering along walls, Siska stumbled through a house made of darkness, because it was everywhere made of wood, going through and back and around until he tripped himself into the kitchen and already this was a place he loved, so he hummed longer and louder.

"Hmmmm, mmmmmmm, _hmmmmmmmm."_

He didn't know much music, certainly not Russian music, but Dolly often sung lullabies to Grisha and Masha, so he'd learned a half dozen tunes, even knew some of the words though he wasn't sure what most of them meant.

What Siska did know was that when this terror happened one morning at the Oblonskys—he can't remember why, but he'd panicked like this, just exactly like this—he'd been holding two-year-old Grigorij, his arms twitching so tight around the child that the usually-jolly toddler whimpered, eyes gone wide.

Francisco had whispered apologies then hummed into Grisha's little ear, dancing the boy round and round the table at which his sisters and brother took turns reading a fairy tale aloud—Vasilisa helping her siblings sound out words they didn't know. The child's fear vanished and, after a little while, Siska's did, too.

So in the dark of a moon-silvered kitchen Father Francisco Garupe hummed himself a Russian lullaby until he could breathe, though it didn't help the cotton in his head, the sense of a sea shifting his feet from under him, or the certainty that he would never ever be done falling.

Then Konstantin started singing.

From a dozen feet away he softly sang the lullaby Francisco hummed, the words pretty with his familiarity. As he sang he slowly closed the distance between them, eight feet, four, then two, until he could gently put his hand on Siska's wrist and then natural as the heat of a hand warming cold skin, twine his fingers with Francisco's, place his temple against the priest's.

And dance.

Small steps round and round the farm table, one, two, three, one, two three, two clocks ticking in time.

Since he was a small boy, Mr Konstantin Levin has been a doubtful sort. Doubtful it'd be sunny enough for the picnic his nurse had planned for his birthday. Doubtful he'd hidden his infatuation for that visiting Siberian prince. Doubtful he'd manage the farm once his father passed, or be a good husband to Kitty.

However.

As of this moment and forever _from_ this moment, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin will not doubt quite a few things.

The rightness of holding Siska until his shaking subsides.

The rightness of singing whispers into his ear until the delicate skin is blush-hot.

The rightness of dancing slow, slower, slowest until, in the slanting light of the moon, they pull far enough back to see one another's eyes.

Not too far away wood snapped loud as the fire fed, but Francisco didn't hear, too busy cupping Kostya's jaw and apropos of everything saying "You're you."

Since he was a small boy Francisco Garupe has been loud quiet. Restless serene. He's been good at aggressive goodness, small bigness. He's been good at _harnessing_ his desires, like a broad river turned from its natural course and guided over waterwheels, its power put to other uses. Siska's Christianity has always been that for him, a place to put the bigness of his emotions, his body, his needs.

Yet now, in this quiet kitchen on a farm outside Moscow, outside every sort of life he's known before, Francisco is letting the course of himself be turned again.

With a hand against his back, a lullaby in his ear, he let Konstantin guide him back to his beginning, back to _broadness._ In the past that looked like taking pride in being tall enough to reach the last nêspera for avó, it looked like happy loudness as he talked philosophy with Magda.

Now it looked like smiling until the moon sparked bright in teeth and eyes, it looked like two moon-tugged rivers rising to meet each other, mouth against mouth against neck, nose, cheek and then mouth again.

It looked like _laughing_ and answering a question from hours ago. "Upstairs Kostya, I pick upstairs."

Giddy, nervous, brave, fingers weaving together again, Konstantin guided Francisco through the dark house and up, up the stairs on tip-toe, down a wide hall, and into his bedroom.

—  
_First know that Altocello, she of the glorious gifts, drew these beautiful boys dancing in[Siska's Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23778112/chapters/57117838). Thank you so much Cello, thank you! Thank you also to 221b_hound and Winklepicker, both of whom made it quiet enough in my head so I could write it, and to ManicZebra! P.S. Pretty [waterwheels](https://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/186824099699/fic-sup-from-my-mouth-in-the-loud-quiet-of). _


	8. Tomorrow and Tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tomorrow and tomorrow Konstantin Levin and Francisco Garupe will find ways to carry out their own kind of hidden piety. 
> 
> Tonight was for a different sort of worship.

Konstantin didn't let go of Francisco's hand.

He knew what it felt like to be set adrift by barriers as small as a table between two chairs, much less a thing as vast as grief. He didn't want that unmooring to happen to Siska again.

So Kostya held his big hand as they climbed the stairs, and he sang Russian lullabies as they passed empty bedrooms that, come Easter or next Christmas, would be full with distant cousins, his brother and sister, sometimes Agafya's daughters. There were even years when Dolly came with the children, and this whole vast house bustled with noise.

So Kostya held an oil lamp high and hummed, light gleaming on closed doors that would eventually slam with holiday urgencies. He loved the thought, did Kostya, of his home like a city in microcosm, but better than Moscow because it would be full of people whose faces he knew and some he actually even liked!

For now all the bedrooms were cold and quiet, his the only one with a fire banked, a bed fresh-made, lamps filled. Agafya had probably even topped up the port he kept on the fireplace mantel and opened his curtains to let the warmth of a faint winter sun inside.

Kostya shook away thoughts of his housekeeper. He didn't want to remember her complaints of a few hours earlier—"I don't know how you expect me to manage your home if I'm kept away _from_ your home"—and he didn't want to think about the pieties she'd certainly soon enough perform, as so many others would, whispering damnation on men like him.

Like _them._

To hell with it, he'll care about that tomorrow, will Konstantin. Tomorrow and tomorrow he'll find ways to carry out his own kind of piety. He knows it can be done because when he wasn't yet twenty he'd heard the murmurs in Moscow about Prince Leonard Abramovich Solonev and the Irishman he'd met at Trinity. Knowing even then he was different, Kostya listened close to that gossip over the years, learning in time that the prince and the professor had found peace beyond city whispers. He's a long way from twenty now, and so Kostya's heard many more rumours of women and men and the scandal of their lives in the end unproven when they find ways to live them behind closed doors.

Tomorrow and tomorrow would be soon enough to think about that, though today he knew something even more important.

It was easy to lie when your lie is just, so tomorrow he would lie if needs must. He didn't believe in damnation for that.

"It's not far now," he promised, knowing in the dark it was hard to sense how large the house was or where its edges lay.

"Nearly a hundred years ago eighteen people lived here if you can believe, twenty-three when you count aunts and uncles come from Kazan or Moscow and staying through an entire season. Now it's just me and a few staff, though mostly they live on the farm, unless the weather's very bad."

 _Such a big house…I was meant to fill it with Kitty and me and children,_ he didn't add. After years of denying to himself what he was, he'd been so relief-giddy when Kitty said yes to his proposal, sure that his denial was at last done. He'd _wanted_ to marry her, have children with her, he'd wanted to live a 'normal' life. Then with the greatest kindness that kind woman refused him.

In the end, he's suffered worse. Russia has always asked hard things of its people, maybe the Levins more than most. His mother died birthing her fourth child, his father passed from exposure, one of his brothers from consumption. The most practical though not the oldest, Kostya kept watch over their land and their legacy, and it was never easy. So his sorrow for a normal life he would never live? In the end it was brief enough.

"Here we are," he said, opening his bedroom door.

Hand still clasped in hand, Siska followed, letting himself be directed however Kostya wanted.

His first thought on entering the room was that he didn't have to duck his head going through the door, his second that the bedroom was almost warm, his third came after Kostya guided them toward the back corner.

Putting the lamp on the mantel and grabbing up a poker left-handed, Konstantin bent them before the hearth so he could uncover a nest of coals then feed them into flames.

"I like this fireplace. These rooms used to be my mother and father's and when I was little and unwell, they'd sit me in front of it. Because it's smaller than all the others in the house, it always felt me-sized. If my throat was sore the nurse would prop me up with blankets and pillows in a chair beside the hearth and give me tea. Sometimes my mother would bring me roasted chestnuts in honey."

Prodding and poking, Kostya chattered away and that's when Siska had his third thought. Was it really so obvious that the dregs of panic still weighted his arms and his legs, was that why Konstantin wouldn't let go of his hand?

_No. Oh no._

Thinking of the panic licked the panic like fire right on up and into his chest, bringing memories of things burning in Japan that should never be burned, bringing sounds that weren't seagulls. The panic flushed his skin, demanded he think of loss, pain, terrible choices, but…but…but…

"Choose. _Choose."_

Siska knew there was something _else_ he could do.

"Choose Father," Sister Loi had said so many months ago at the Macao mission. "Choose," she repeated over and over those first days after he'd fled Japan, unable to find the will to eat, to move, to grieve. "Just choose to touch the soup spoon for a moment, father. Or the book. Or meet my eye. For just a moment.

"Because in even the smallest choice there's power."

Wise beyond her two dozen years, she was so very right.

Though it took a week, nearly two, before he chose to raise his eyes from rosary-empty hands—a samurai had taken it from him somewhere outside Nagasaki—when Francisco finally did he didn't stop.

Every day, day by day, he _chose._

Though his starved belly rebelled at food, when they next brought him soup he chose to put a fingertip into the broth. Meal after meal he did that, a single finger touching the soup. Then one morning it wasn't so hard to lift the bowl and swallow a mouthful.

He chose too to pick up a book, then put it down, pick up others until the words of one snagged his gaze, then he read and read. Eventually he looked up at the sisters looking after him, until finally he was talking to the Chinese and French nurses, even to the Spanish Jesuit, a refugee like him, who'd lived in Algarve, where Francisco's avó had been born.

_Choose._

So instead of focusing on the panic trying to burn through him again, Siska chose to listen to Kostya's chatter and watch firelight dance over his face, spark like the sun in his eyes, his beard, then catch fast in the delightful thickets of his bright red eyebrows. So that Kostya wouldn't have to carry the burden of conversation forever, Francisco Garupe chose to talk, too.

And said the very first thing that popped into his head.

"When I was a boy I used to watch the pine processionaries after they came out from hibernation. They're tiny red caterpillars that emerge by the hundreds in late winter and march all in a red row toward the pine trees they feed on." He grinned and tried not to look at Kostya's eyebrows, very much Siska tried, because it would be rude to imply, to say, to hint that— "You eyebrows made me think of the caterpillars just now."

_Merda, merda, merda!_

With a gasp Francisco Garupe pressed fingers over his own willful mouth. Konstantin though, oh Konstantin, instead of taking insult he took _joy,_ cackling louder than snapping firewood, louder than panic, the best noise Siska had ever heard _ever_ in all his thirty-six years.

For the first time but very much not the last Francisco watched the grand parade of Kostya's delight as the cackling turned to laughing which became giggling which in the end was a toothy grin that reached right on up to his bright green eyes.

Then Kostya himself reached up and Siska chose, he chose, he very much chose to stay so very still when Kostya pressed his own fingers over the ones still over Francisco mouth…then slipped a finger between them.

And touched Siska's lips.

Softly he ran his fingertip across pink skin, a hot and gentle pressure back and forth until Siska's lips tingled. Then Kostya replaced that finger with his mouth, kissing the knuckles of Francisco's hand.

It was barely even a kiss, but it was already better than those kitchen kisses because those had been about claiming calm from panic. Now, though, spreading his fingers wider, laughing, kissing _back_ through the barrier of his own hand, Francisco wished he could taste Kostya's hot breath and feel his tongue and then realised he _could._

Hand dropping away, Siska opened his mouth inelegantly wide to capture Konstantin's breath, then lipped softly at the slick, active tongue. Though it tasted of nothing in his mouth it felt like it was everywhere, warming his blood and pounding his heart. Pulling away, just a little, they came back to kiss again. When Kostya finally let go of his other hand Siska in reflex grasped thin fingers and placed them in his own black hair.

Then froze, veins shooting cold with adrenalin before the instant passed and he remembered his hair wasn't lank and greasy any more, he was in Russia now, safe, clean.

"I love your hair," Kostya said, "Can I say that? That it's beautiful and the first time I saw you, I think you were holding Luda, I was jealous of that baby girl because she had her hands in your hair!"

Francisco laughed. He's always been vain about his hair, has he and though he doesn't know the future, Siska's vanity in it will only grow over the years and each time Kostya wakes him by pressing his face into the warm mess of it, each time Kostya praises the beauty of the silver when it starts shining among the black.

Siska whispered, "Yes please," then dipped his head in invitation, until two hands took gentle hold. He laughed again. "Would you still be jealous if you knew Ludmilla never, ever touches my hair? What she really does," he said, clutching Kostya's wrists and moving him, "is hold me by the ears."

There was the cackle again, involuntary and instantly shy because oh lord, those ears! He shouldn't laugh! But they're invisible beneath the priest's long hair and until just this minute Kostya had no clue that they were…that they were…

"Huge," Siska giggled, "They're huge, aren't they? But I was in seminary with a boy whose ears were even bigger! When I pick Luda up she uses them to direct me, left and right and left, go here go there!"

 _Come here then please,_ said Konstantin's gentle tug on those glorious ears, _kiss my mouth again._

No indeed Francisco Garupe doesn't know the future and so he doesn't know that unto old age this man will love and praise and stroke his hair. He doesn't know how exceedingly fond they'll grow of Kostya clutching his ears to guide him exactly where he wants Siska's mouth to _suck._

There _is_ something about the future Francisco knows though, and that is this: He will worship Konstantin Levin if Konstantin will let him.

When Kostya's hands slide from his ears to his neck to his collar, until fingers rest lightly against the buttons at his throat, Francisco knows the answer.

They'll worship each other.

 _—  
Comments are forever apprecaited and, p.s. here are [pine processonaries](http://www.planetepassion.eu/WILDLIFE-IN-FRANCE/Pine-processionary-moth-Thaumetopoea-pityocampa-France.jpg) and Domhnall's [caterpillar eyebrows](https://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/187351034749/it-was-necessary-that-i-post-a-sampling-of). Resemblance? Yes!_


	9. Sticks and Stones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _one two three_  
>  one two three  
> one two three

_One, two, three little pearls._

Firelight danced on the trio of tiny buttons on Siska's shirt, a little regiment lined up high on his collar. They were miniscule things, absurd, fashionable. Or they were, a few years ago and before Stiva had stained the shirt's cuff with gravy.

Which was to say that the shirt Francisco Garupe wore now—too short in the sleeve, too loose everywhere else, but quite long enough thank you—was a Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky hand-me-down, like the black coat he wore over it, the trousers beneath it, and the shoes under those.

Not one item given by Stiva to the priest caring for his children was new or any longer fine. Much like Stiva's 'love' for his wife.

Those angry thoughts about his friend, which had been coming more often over the years, flit fast through Konstantin's head as his hand rested on that row of three little white buttons, fingertips fiddling a nervous count—

_one two three_

—while he glanced up into Francisco's eyes, down again, up, each time asking for permission.

 _May I undo these absurdly tiny buttons, Siska?_ Is that all right? Am I too bold? Are we too fast? Do you know that I wonder if you have lovely moles on your chest, like you have on your beautiful face? May I wonder? May I see you Siska? _May I please?_

Kostya spoke these words with fingers softly tap-tapping over those tiny buttons _one two three, one two three._ He spoke, too, with his tongue slicking across teeth shiny with spit in the firelight, and yes Francisco's mind flit too, watching that tongue wriggle wet, wondering about the slick of Kostya's tongue and wanting to _suck._

Before the first time he'd seen this man, his sun-bright smile vying with his sun-bright hair, Francisco had never let himself want such things much less _have_ them. Destined to be a priest by temperament and family expectation, he'd always known his body belonged to god. When he grew tall and his voice deep, when his chest broadened and his chin went dark with hair, he thought that knowing his flesh served his faith was why it was easy to look away from his sisters' friends. Turn away when one of them smiled at him while they whispered in Magda's or Liliana's ear.

Then just after his seventeenth birthday Francisco entered the seminary hundreds of miles from home.

And hated it.

Though he'd go on to spend years away on missions to Ireland, Turkey, India, and ultimately Japan, in those early days Francisco loathed being far from home. He was homesick to the point of _being_ sick, down with every cold, suffering every possible allergy to local plants or cuisine. There was a ginger-haired novitiate in Seminário Conciliar de Braga, but it was _Siska_ nicknamed Red, his noticeable nose usually bright as a beacon on his pale face.

But beyond those things, Francisco hated wanting to look at the bodies of the other boys. At first he hoped it was just a natural tendency to see how they were all the same or different.

So newly bared of baby-fat, many of the boys were also lanky limbed like him, their jaws and chins sharp, some bristling with what would be full beards if they didn't shave every morning, though others, like him, still had only scruff. When he would glance _down there,_ he told himself it was because he'd heard how some boys were circumcised, though he didn't know what that looked like.

Once study started to consume his waking hours, the homesickness passed, and in the end he was too tired for his new and confusing desires.

But Siska dreamt, like everyone does.

He had dreams of his parents, of his sisters when they were all children. There were dreams of the seminary, his tutors, his studies, and ridiculous dreams where he could fly or understand cats. There were also dreams of flesh and warmth and touch. When he woke from those, he'd have already come and for a seventeen-year-old boy wishing to be as good as his god, it was mortifying.

So the rare times Francisco woke from these dreams still dry, cock hard under his nightshirt, he'd settle his hands over his chest and recite psalms in his head until he went soft or fell asleep. For years that was how he managed want, and it _worked._ It had been more than a dozen years since he'd experience one of those flush-faced nights of guilt.

Then he and Sebastião had gone to Japan and everything changed.

For over a year they stayed hidden in the mountains north of Nagasaki, hiding from the samurai who searched for them, suffering lice and flies, hunger and fear. In darkness and secret they practiced their forbidden religion, performed dozens of baptisms, heard hundreds of confessions, prayed with Japanese Christians thousands of prayers, yet in all that time of lament and need, their God had remained silent.

Even when Francisco's heart was screaming.

Found eventually, separated, and it was months before Siska saw his friend again, running into the sea as samurai pushed bound men and women off the side of a boat. _"Look at your friend father,"_ the magistrate whispered in his ear, as Sebastião swam. _"Look how he fights to save these strangers. You can save them all you know. If you trample the fumie, father, we'll bring those poor Christians back to shore and let them go. And your friend will be safe. It's so easy, just a single light step father. You don't even have to mean it."_

Francisco hadn't stepped on the small wooden crucifix placed at his feet. Instead he'd struggled against his ropes and screamed, cried, prayed, but none of that saved Sebastião or the Christians wrapped in wicker mats so they couldn't save themselves. It was only a few days after his beloved friend drown that Siska apostated, stepping on the crucified Christ—that precious body shiny black from how many other trampling feet?—only a few days before Father Francisco Garupe perfectly understood God's silence.

God did not care about them. Not about His priests, the Japanese peasants, not about prayer nor suffering.

 _one two three_ , _one two three_

Siska shook his head clear as Konstantin patted the tiny buttons at his neck gently, grinned toothy. And again that tongue, that _tongue!_ Later Siska will tell his love, "I was going to kiss you I think, I do think I was going to be bold, because I wanted to capture that beautiful wiggling thing," but Kostya was bold first, so he pushed a little pearl through its buttonhole.

 _One-two!_  
One-two!  
One-two!

Don't think you can't see a man's heart suddenly start pounding—you can because Konstantin _did,_ right there in Siska's throat the pulse ramping from fast to frantic the moment that first button was undone.

"Oh," he said, and wanted to kiss the pulse calm, whisper endearments, reassure, but instead Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin went and had himself a revelation: Father Francisco Garupe had never made love before. He must be scared.

As conclusions go, this one was kind and it was sweet.

It was also wrong.

So when Kostya began to respectfully step back, Siska took hold of his thin wrists.

He's gentle, is Siska, but he's big. Most respond to that instinctively, and Kostya was no different. He stilled immediately, palms flat either side of that slightly-open collar, cheeks pink, gaze lowered.

"There's…"

Francisco was still numb to many things but to his own body, no. Every morning he sees how the hungry flesh still hangs loose. He sees the marks just above his wrist bones from all the times his arms were tied back or the marks from the sharp stones thrown by children as he walked captive along the road to Nagasaki. Every wound had taken so long to heal, leaving him with so, so many…

"…scars," he said, almost too low to hear. Because Siska may be numb to many things, and he may, just may, possibly be furious at the silence of God, but here in this room with this beautiful, perfect man, Francisco very much feels one thing bright and clear.

Shame.

Which is why it's fortunate for him that Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin has always been something of an old man. When he was eight he worried about the farm, the cows, the wheat harvests. When he was ten he worried about his brother's drinking. When he was twelve and his mother died he worried about his father. So though he's only thirty-five, Konstantin Levin is older than the skin he's in so he uttered not one single reassurance.

Instead he wriggled his wrists free of a grip he was sure Siska didn't know he'd tightened. Then, with a smiling frown—"how do you _do_ that my love?" Siska will whisper one night soon, fingers tracing the downward curve of Kostya's grin _—_ Konstantin pulled at the droopy bow of his cravat until it hung loose round his neck, then looked into Siska's eyes.

When he saw brightness instead of fear, Kostya pulled the cravat free, a pretty thing of brown and gold, and held it out until Francisco took it, instinctively wrapping the silky thing round both his big hands.

Next Kostya shed his waistcoat, cheeks flushed bright, then instead of removing his fine linen shirt he took hold of the top button of his trousers, took a shaky breath, then quickly undid and dropped them to his ankles, only then realising his boots were still on so he couldn't…they…he hadn't…

Shoulders drooping with a sigh, Kostya clutched the hem of his shirt in both hands and to the tips of the boots peeking out from under his crumpled trousers, he said what he hadn't before. "It's all right Siska."

Francisco's gaze had followed Kostya's down and down and for a moment he also looked at Kostya's boots and the pool of his trousers, but just as quickly he looked up because he wanted to _see._

So he saw.

The _first_ thing he saw were horizontal scars across Kostya's shins. One ran higher and longer than the other but both were jagged, red, and thick. "I was ten and angry because Nikolai wouldn't give me the scythe. He yanked it away and didn't see me try to reach for it again as he swung. The one on my left leg went down to the bone. I think Kolya cried almost more about it than I did."

Kostya fisted the edge of his shirt tighter, lifted it to expose his right hip, where there was another scar, still pink with newness. "One of Sviyazhsky's boys was drunk and went after one of the farm girls with a hay knife. We stepped in and he…" Kostya shrugged. "Uh, there's one from a sickle on my back, and," he ran his left hand up along his right arm. "I was stung by bees on holiday a few years ago and for weeks I scratched at the stings. Now there are so many tiny…"

Scars.

Kostya suddenly laughed so loudly they both jumped. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he giggled. "I just remembered I also have one back here—"

He touched the underside of his jaw where his red beard was thick. "—because when I was a boy I thought shaving would make me grow up quicker. I didn't have one hair to shave then, not a single one and I nearly cut my own throat!"

They both jumped again when Siska stepped forward quick-quick, and ducking his head softly said, "Show me."

Kostya lifted his chin, guiding Siska's fingers along his throat. When those fingers found the scar, Francisco separated the hair—Kostya's skin hived up in goosebumps—and he kissed it.

"Beautiful," he told that scar. Then he touched Konstantin's right arm and with sincerity told _it_ that it was likewise beautiful. He touched the place on Kostya's right hip and whispered the same.

Then with a deep breath Siska shed his coat, as much of his fear as he was able, and like the woman who had anointed Christ's feet, he went to his knees. He bowed low and kissed Kostya's scarred shins.

Then, then, and only then, Francisco sat back on his heels and touched the tiny buttons on his collar.

_one, two, three_

And he undid them.

—  
_Am I trying to tell this slowly? No, but they are. Thank you for reading and loving these two souls. By the way, all of Siska's trials in Japan come directly from Shūsaku Endō's book "Silence."_


	10. Azulejos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Azulejos…" Francisco murmured, reaching two fingers and scribing in the air what he saw.
> 
> Konstantin grinned because there was something so very pretty about a language he didn't know. Everything sounded like an endearment if it was whispered just so, so Kostya whispered azulejos back because it sounded sweet and he wanted to give this man sweetness.

Agafya Mikhailovna Yelagina looked through her kitchen window and into the dark.

She has lived in this small house on this large farm since before Konstantin Dmitrievich was born. She was nurse to him then, she is housekeeper to him now, and despite what he may see of _her,_ she sees _him._

That has always meant seeing a boy of frowns and worries, joy and unexpected intuition.

Agafya remembers his five-year-old sorrow when he saw a stillborn calf, she remembers his fascination when he found the bones of an old farm cat. He talked creation then, did the little boy, in his high, sweet voice he discussed god. He wondered aloud where the small creature's heart had sat inside her cathedral of ribs, where kittens might have lived inside her, if she had been lonely.

He doesn't let things go, Konstantin Dmitrievich, he thinks things all the way through except those times he doesn't (falling in love, in turn, with each Shcherbatsky daughter was, and ever shall be to Agafya, one of those times where he didn't think).

So the small boy thought about that cat for weeks, visiting its skeleton with flowers whenever his little brain thought of it. "We should say prayers," he had told her, so Agafya taught him prayers of the Old Believers, to which he took readily. Until he didn't.

That came when he was fifteen and often angry, like his brother Nikolai always was. Unlike Nikolai, Konstantin's furies were not driven by drink and petulance, but by unfairness, hypocrisy, and the riches of his class which "I've done nothing to earn."

That year, the next, and all the years after is when he took to working on the farm right beside the peasants, sowing, reaping, attending the birthing of every cow. He found peace with mucky hands, with the sight of wheat baled neat. He found peace beside boys his own age and yes, though peasant they call her, Agafya's eyes work just fine and you can't grow a babe to manhood without understanding what he means when, coming in from the fields after celebrating the end of the harvest with the neighbouring farmers and their sons, he says "life could be fair if we wanted; it could be fair, _it could be fair."_

So when Agafya Mikhailovna Yelagina looked out into the dark night from a window of her small, warm house, all she had to do was to turn just a little to see the back of Konstantin Dmitrievich's house and the dance of firelight limning his bedroom window bright.

Those dancing shadows on his ceiling sent her mind dancing, too. She remembered for no reason the rabbit she'd had as a girl, thought of the loaves of bread rising in her small kitchen, recalled the crackling ice on the lake, thought of the mushrooms she still had left and the soup into which she'd put them, remembered the vareniki she'd sent home with Konstantin Dmitrievich, which focused her gaze again to see…

…him there, framed by his own bedroom window, turning, looking, talking to a tall, black-haired man, standing close.

Ah. The Portuguese.

Konstantin Dmitrievich has talked often about the Oblonsky's tutor, the Jesuit who'd come away from terrible things in Japan. She imagines that each time Konstantin Dmitrievich talked about him, he believed he'd couched his conversations in vagaries about the Oblonsky children or the Oblonskys themselves.

But you cannot, you absolutely cannot rear a boy to tallness, boss and bully the man he is now to take care of belly and heart, without hearing the timber of his voice change—tripping-light with pretend indifference—when he talks about that priest, white-skinned and dark-haired, solemn and somber and devout.

In the big house heavy curtains were soon drawn against the cold, but Agafya had seen enough and knew much more.

"It's not fair," he'd said that night after the harvest, seventeen-years-old and drunk, she was sure, for the first time. "It's not fair," he repeated frowning at the kitchen fire, hand fisted at the side of his neck. She couldn't see the mark under his collar but she knew there was one, just like she knew what wasn't "fair."

He was too young to know that fair was God's will, not ours. God knew what was right for us, she told him that night. Otherwise fair had a suspicious way of looking like our own petty wants and desires, instead of what God knew we needed.

She looked at the curtained window of Konstantin Dmitrievich's bedroom. The Jesuit would know about God's will, though what a poor creature he must be. Was there anyone more pitiful than a priest born to service but who hasn't measured up to his task?

Shaking her head, Agafya Mikhailovna Yelagina closed her curtains against the dark and there by her window she prayed for Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin.

*

Dolly, Kitty, and Anna looked for all the world as if they prayed.

Instead one was fighting to cover her smile, the other her laughter, the third her blush.

While Sochi's Black Sea lapped at the stone wall outside Anna Arkadyevna Karenina's apartments, she laughed through her fingers, "—and then she said, 'Don't you worry kotik, we have all kinds here, you and your little kotyonok are not so different from the rest of us.'"

Blushing at being called Anna's kitten by Anna's landlady, Katerina Alexandrovna Shcherbatsky—Kitty to her friends—suddenly sat up straight, chin high. "Anna, please never tell Madame Vachon that I'm _not_ your very own darling!"

Dolly smiled at her sister, then at her friend, happy Anna had found a place of comfort after all that had happened to her in Saint Petersburg.

"It'd make me dull, wouldn't it?" Anna laughed and waved to the apartment beside hers. "My neighbour Countess Modrzejewska has two husbands, and the gentleman above is an old priest who claims he married his bishop in a secret Brazilian rite."

Listening to the bustle of Sochi below Anna's windows, opened just a little to let the scent of the sea inside, Dolly vowed she'd make time to visit her friend more often and to remember she was more than she allowed herself to be. Which reminded her…

"Speaking of priests," Dolly said, "Kostya has made himself a friend of one," and then Dolly said nothing else.

Kitty's eyes went round as saucers, bright and hopeful. Young she is, sheltered she once was, but no longer. The woman Konstantin Levin was once betrothed to marry understood the words unsaid. "Has he? Has he really?"

Dolly poured their glasses full again. "Yes kotyonok, very much. After Masha wakes from her nap, let's go for those crepes Madame Vachon told us about and we can walk along the boardwalk where I'll tell you all about him."

*

When he was seventeen years old Konstantin Levin tapped his glass against the glass of a local farm boy and together they drank down their vodka. Sergio's father—a Spaniard who'd settled with his Muscovite wife on a farm not too far from the Levin family farm—had filled their glasses again and he and the Russian boy with the Spanish name had drunk those down too, looking at one another from the corners of their eyes.

Kostya doesn't remember now how many glasses they had that night, nor when they found themselves alone behind bales and far from the fire's light. He does remember that vodka had made them brave and that he'd held the other boy so tightly his arms shook but even so he'd felt strong as a bull, like he could hold them together forever and against anything.

Sergio had kissed him, his neck and his face, his mouth and his hair, he'd kissed and kissed until Konstantin tilted his head, exposing the only part of his body he could. Sergio pushed Kostya's collar down and down until he could kiss his bare shoulder, collarbone, the top of his chest and back again, finally settling his mouth low on Kostya's neck and biting soft. When Konstantin whimpered and shook harder, Sergio sucked.

It was that, the feeling of Sergio's strong mouth marking him, that let Konstantin know Sergio'd done this before. It was a thrilling thought, because in the mixed up, drunken muddle of his mind that somehow said that what they were doing was all right.

He whimpered. "Harder."

Cheering not too far away separated them a little but only briefly. Sergio teethed at Konstantin's bare skin and said low, "Papa says terrible things about this," and _this_ was clear. Boys with boys, men with men.

"I know," Kostya said though he didn't really. "I won't tell."

The cheering seemed closer, and Sergio let Konstantin go but Kostya held on a little longer, his thin arms strong with will and need. "Please," he said, kissing the boy's chin and feeling, feeling, feeling his own heart trying to beat itself into Sergio's chest.

It was the voice of Silov calling that curled the other boy in on himself, there in the dark. "It's not fair," he whispered against Kostya's neck, then wiggled out of his embrace, face tracked with tears he wiped away.

They held one another's hand hard, and in the dark they panted hot breath on each other's faces, its own humid marking, then Sergio was gone and that was the only time they ever found where they could be alone.

 _It's not fair,_ Kostya thought standing in front of Siska and watching his hands shake as they _one two three four,_ opened button after button. _Not fair that_ he _has to be brave._

So Kostya knelt before the priest and with a nod they shed their shirts together. Then they both _completely_ lost the plot.

Konstantin Dmietrivich Levin tends toward seriousness except the times he laughs like one of his clucking chickens. It was that bubbling joy filling him up right now, a need to giggle and gasp as he marveled at the broad body in front of him. He could count Francisco's breast bones but even with the terrible clarity of those bones and tendons Kostya could see the strength of the priest's hungry body, the width of his chest and hips. This man would be a mountain when he was healthy again and oh Konstantin would, he would, he very much would feed him strong, he would sup this beautiful man well.

For his part, well Francisco Garupe doesn't much sing but he'd have happily raised his voice in a hymn right now, eyes roaming the glory of Konstantin's pale, freckless flesh.

 _Azulejos,_ he thought, gaze following the faint blue of veins beneath Kostya's white skin, that's what this beautiful body reminded him of, the bright white and blue tiles of Portugal.

"Azulejos…" he murmured, reaching two fingers and scribing in the air what he saw.

Kostya grinned because there was something so very _pretty_ about a language he didn't know. Everything sounded like an endearment if it was whispered just so, so Konstantin whispered _azulejos_ back because it sounded sweet and he wanted to give Siska sweetness.

A feedback loop, their words made joy, joy encouraged braveness, so Siska took Konstantin's hand and lifted his arm up, then ran his fingers inside Kostya's elbow and smiled at the gooseflesh. "In the city where my madre's from there's a tiny church covered in blue and white tiles, we call them azulejos. You said you loved this fireplace when you were little because it was small like you…that's why I loved that holy place in the city square. Azulejos often make up these grand images high up in churches or over municipalities but this one, this church, the tile went all the way down to my toes, so it was the size of _me._ I used to run my finger all over the curves and the loops and the circles, up and down and from one end to the other."

Siska ran his fingers up and down and all over Kostya's arm then kissed his palm. "You are a holy place," he told it shyly and that, right there, was at last enough, enough, _enough_ tip-toeing for Konstantin Levin thank you. He tipped inelegantly back onto his behind and tried to yank off his trousers.

That, right there, that moment was where the two of them truly begin. Because two men habituated to solemnity learned that it was only _habit_ that kept them serious and so they started laughing and pretty much for the rest of their long lives together _this_ would be their them—ridiculous, giggling, impatient and patient, sacred and profane.

"Merda Kostya no! Your boots, you still have your boots on!"

Konstantin couldn't stop laughing _or_ trying to tug his trousers off over his shoes, so he kept doing both even as Siska giggled while trying to pluck those delicate little hands away, very much stronger than they looked. "I have it," Kostya shouted insistently, not having it at all even a little bit. "No, no, this way," said Siska, twisting a hem, "or you'll tear them!"

Eventually Konstantin's cackling came, as it always will, and as it will for all his years Siska laughed loud in response, the hysteria taking its time to work tense muscles so loose that eventually both of them half-slumped against the hearth, breathless and with absolutely no one naked.

The fire was warm. Siska watched it dance and wondered how he'd been afraid of it before, then he looked at the man across from him and wanted just a little bit to cry.

 _It's true, you are my holy place,_ he thought, and then reaching slowly, as if his living and breathing church might be skittish, Siska took hold of a boot and _pulled._ It slipped off with ease, and so did its twin. Before Francisco could put that second boot down, Konstantin kicked off his trousers, unwilling to let the solemnity back. "Off," he said, breathless, rising to his knees and shoving down the long drawers that kept him warm through the winter. Watching Francisco's gaze, he saw that it emphatically did not go higher than _there, right there._

Siska blink-blinked. And then a little more. Because the Portuguese do not…glow.

Not on head or chin, and not _there, right there._

Russians aren't often red-haired either, so Kostya was aware of the rareness of the—he looked down. Of the fire-bright hair between his legs. Brighter than even his beard or the hair on his head it was a ridiculous—

"Beautiful," Siska whispered, as if he'd heard.

—patch of flame around his cock.

Which was growing.

It took _one, two, three, four_ long seconds before Siska could look away, but he's done harder things, so away he looked, and then he held Kostya's gaze and took off his shoes, placing them carefully beside Konstantin's.

There were a few heartbeats, then Siska got up to his knees and then down to his bottom, tugging everything off awkwardly.

They were both naked now, Siska blushing at the state of his body, because he knew this wasn't how he looks, this wasn't _him,_ this thin, stringy—

"Beautiful," Kostya whispered, as if he'd heard.

—body, but he won't think of that now.

Before anyone could have any more thoughts in place of _doing,_ each man took the other's hand. Then Kostya stumbled them tall and said, "Come, let me show you something."

—  
 _First, here are the[azulejos](https://bomdia.eu/azulejo-portugues-caminho-patrimonio-da-unesco/) Siska was talking about, and here are quite a number of [churches](https://www.google.com/search?q=church+azulejos+portugal&safe=active&client=firefox-b-1-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn-IWeosfkAhXFRxUIHS3BBt4Q_AUIEigB&biw=1487&bih=725) covered in them. Second, this is a happy story, so don't let Agafya's thoughts worry you. Third, I missed Dolly (and kotik means pussycat)! Finally, I've just started week three of my masters and though new chapters may take three weeks to appear, they'll always appear; I've already got the next one going. I love these boys too much not to steal every moment I can writing them!_


	11. Slow Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not all fire burns fast.

That something he wanted to show Siska, was simply _softness._

You see, Konstantin Levin is a farmer right down to his calluses, right down to knowing the precise week of each cow's pregnancy, the exact tonnage of every harvest of corn or wheat. He knows the boundaries of his thousands of acres, how many structures are built on them, and precisely exactly oh so very much how he'll improve his land next (a church, Kostya believes he will next build a church).

However, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin is not _only_ a farmer.

Inside the dark wood of his wide wardrobe there are top hats, for example. He has two of fine black silk, another of grey-banded felt, a third in brown brought back from Bulgaria. There are three sets of tailcoats and trousers suitable for court, six silk waistcoats, there is at the bottom of his wardrobe a neat regiment of shoes and boots, some so bright he can nearly see in their shine the colour of his own hair.

Though he once struggled with having what he hadn't earned, Kostya does enjoy the aristocratic luxuries into which he was born.

Like his bed.

He'd been conceived in this house in this room in this bed, more than thirty years ago. Wider and longer than his father was tall, the mattress was fat with feathers and batting, and it was…

"Soft," Kostya said shyly, then repeated louder and boldly, as if daring someone unseen to deny Siska's tender bones the sweetness of its comfort.

Kostya lit the candles beside the bed, then pulled back the heavy red counterpane and all the blankets under it, exposing white sheets and high hills of pillows, their cases edged in silk.

Here is a thing: a man can get used to most things if the getting used to them meant staying alive. He can adapt to being always wet, fly-bitten, and afraid.

He can adapt to other things, too.

So as if this privilege had always been his, Francisco Garupe crawled into Konstantin's bed with the ease of familiarity, and as if he'd done it every night of his grown life, Kostya followed him. Then, natural as breathing, they took one another's hands and breathed.

 _With_ each other, in and out; _for_ each other, over chilly hands and chins and noses.

They watched firelight soften one another with shadows, they wriggled and smiled themselves closer, went serious, then smiled again when one wrapped a foot round an ankle, the other a thigh over a hip.

They breathed with each other and moved until cocks and bellies pressed against each other…then no one breathed.

Soon they'll laugh at the careful _care_ they took tonight, this tentative dance of desire, like boys to which it was all brand new. Soon enough one will smear butter on the other and pretend it was an accident then lick away the grease, making a mess of sheets, but those sheets will already be a mess of other things.

They don't know now that _then_ this bed is already a sanctuary, scented by their sweat and joy, coloured by threads of black hair here and red there, pillows a fortress around them or piled on the floor by the fire, pushed beneath heads and hips as they take turns pushing into each other.

That will be then, soon, but right now they just…waited a bit, thought a bit, and then Kostya fed Francisco.

"Gorgeous," he said, touching the moles above Siska's eyebrow. The diet right now was endearments, a banquet fed to Siska from his own mouth.

"Sweet," he said to the moles either side of Francisco's nose. "Tiny," to the little ones beside his eye, "beautiful" twice and "enchanting" once to the three dotted on Siska's neck.

He wiggled down and kissed Francisco's collarbone, called the dark freckle there "little comet," while another was "mouse." The constellation across his belly Konstantin dubbed "stars."

They shifted until Siska was on his back. Goosebumps rose on arms and round nipples, and though they weren't there from the cold, oh no, still and all Kostya sat up on his knees, the light glowing his hair halo-bright, and with a grin he pulled everything over his head and up to Siska's chin.

Then he stayed down there, in the dark.

He didn't need light to find a belly button with his tongue, to rest his hands on the firmness of thighs, nor to find his place between them.

Once quite settled, he kissed and kissed and kissed Francisco's thighs and hip bones, his belly and the hair between his legs, Kostya kissed and he kissed…until one big hand rested at the side of his face.

Permission.

That's when Kostya sucked.

Francisco meant to be silent. He wasn't. Though the words he said weren't in Portuguese or Russian, they were…

"Ahffff. Ahhh."

…a language of sighs and groans, grunts and breath held. He was hyper aware of his hand in Konstantin's hair, of holding lightly though his chest was tight and his belly hard. Then he tried to say _I_ and couldn't, then he tried again and still couldn't, and then he stopped trying to say anything.

Kostya pulled away just enough to kiss Siska's cock and mumble against it, "It's all right," then wrapped his arms under Siska's legs, holding so tight…

…that it was grounding and freeing, both. Francisco's hand fell to the bed and he let it be _all right,_ coming in Kostya's mouth with noisy not-words and thighs falling wide.

Every one of Konstantin's five senses buzzed busy just then.

Blinking eyes open, he saw in cover-skewed half-dark the beautiful curve of Siska's chest as his back bowed. He heard Siska's high moan, ragged with relief. He felt the muscles in Siska's legs shake. And he tasted the bitter and the salt of Siska's come while he came. And that took awhile, as if it had been years since the last time, because it had.

Then Kostya _smelled_ things. The scent of his own breath, sweat and semen, all of it a perfect musky wetness beneath the blankets.

"Meu bem…"

If asked to choose right then the finest scent, Konstantin would pick that, times that, forever that.

"Meu bem…"

So much so that when Francisco reached for him under the blankets Kostya resisted those big hands so he could press his face into the humid warmth between fine thighs, breathing deep.

Finally though, Kostya obeyed and wiggled his way up and up, Francisco's fingers sliding from neck to shoulder to waist because fear had gone away finally, fear of his own failures and of silence, so he touched and talked.

"You're ticklish, querido."

"I'm ticklish everywhere," Kostya whispered, the words so much a promise, a dare, an enticement, that he laughed, so Siska put his mouth over his, hungry for the joy pouring out of it. He stroked Kostya's arms, relished the dip at the small of his back, then he pulled Konstantin on top of him by the ripe curves of his ass.

Immediately Kostya squirmed right off again and to the plush mattress. "What," he whispered, "does meu bem mean?"

Siska turned and cupped Kostya's cheek soft, soft, soft. He stroked the fire of his beard and whispered "my darling, meu bem, my very darling." Then his hand whispered down, down, to ribs—Konstantin twitched and laughed—a waist, the tender scar on Kostya's hip, then light, lighter, lightest he trailed his fingers over Kostya's belly and—

—Kostya curled up, knees pressed against Francisco's thighs. He reached for Siska's hand before it could touch his barely-hard cock, held it tight in both of his, and said nothing at all.

"Adorado, meu adorado." It was the soft sound of Siska's adoration murmured right into Kostya's mouth.

"I'm sorry. I take…" Konstantin flushed; he was _always_ this way. Many more times than once, his teenaged self had peeped through bedroom curtains at the girls and boys in the field, and though his cheeks grew hot and his heart hammered, he'd only get half-hard, sometimes not even that. It twisted somewhere inside him, feeling that desire in his head, but not his body.

Oh, and then, then there was Sergio.

Slim as a reed and nearly as tall as he was, he would watch Sergio move smooth and easy, sweat sliding slow down his neck and Kostya'd get so hard it hurt but even then he took—

"…awhile. Sometimes."

He wanted to add a dozen thing in a rush— _It's not you, not you, I want and want and want you, but my body wakes slowly—_ but Konstantin didn't say it, so Siska didn't hear it.

He saw it just fine though. _It_ was the desire in Kostya's eyes, in the blood flushing his skin, in the pounding Siska could feel in the hand Kostya held against his heart.

Instead of saying _it's all right,_ Siska forgot he was inexperienced and until ten minutes ago virgin, he forgot he no longer filled out his flesh with the swell of muscle, instead he remembered every. little. thing. Kostya had done these last months that has caught his eye.

So Siska rolled on to his back and he streeeeeetched. He lifted his chin, head back, neck a perfect curve, like the time in Dolly's garden when Kostya'd tipped his chin toward the sun high, high. Siska smiled now like Kostya had smiled then, and though he'd been standing in the solarium holding Ludmilla—he was always holding that child—Francisco had imagined he heard an indulgent, throaty sigh.

So then, right then, as if he knew already the power his body held, Francisco Garupe did a thing Konstantin Levin will never, not one time _ever_ be able to resist, he fisted his hand in his own dark hair and he _sighed._

Slow his body is but it _does_ catch up to his heart and Kostya's was on that road at a fair gallop, he was getting close and closer with closest nearly in sight, but then something happened.

One.

Little.

Thing.

_Happened._

Siska's belly growled.

—  
 _First, you need to know that in Portuguese minha batatinha means my little potato. I didn't use it here but it was important we all know that. Second you need to know that the supping of Sup From My Mouth is, after twenty thousand words, about to really and truly kick in. And third, yes, Kostya is demisexual._


	12. Lullaby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Born into privilege, Konstantin Levin's always known the pampering of choice, but no one chooses their passions or their fears, so Kostya had never chosen this: a bone-deep horror of hunger. 
> 
> So when Siska's belly growled, Kostya knew only one need…the need to fed him. 
> 
> And so he did.

Firewood cracked, snow thudded from an eave, but the only thing Kostya heard was the sound of Siska's belly.

And oh he went _stupid_ with it. Blink-blinking, head shaking, he couldn't think past a single monotonous mantra: _hungry, hungry, hungry._

Oh, Konstantin Levin has never wanted for food. Born into privilege, he's known the pampering of choice all his life, but no one chooses their passions or their fears, so Kostya had never chosen this: a bone-deep horror of _hunger._ This meant that right now, this moment, he was deaf to the soft sound of Siska's skin on sheets, to the sweetness of his small sighs, no, what Kostya heard was the rumbling of _need._

It was everything and nothing like the sound he first heard at eight, then eighteen, then only last year, a soft hungry low from a calf rejected by the herd. No one chooses their passions, no, not even rich men born to abundance, so when he was eight, and twenty-eight, and last year, Konstantin Levin _fed._ At midnight, when it was raining, in the cold, he gave calves the milk their mothers wouldn't, hands and arms dripping with milky spit by the end and it was the very opposite of a hardship.

He was already sliding from the bed, _stupid,_ not thinking past action, forgetting for a moment that this wasn't a wordless creature needing his help but a man who was just now realising that Kostya had gone quiet, that Kostya was _moving away._

Misunderstanding completely, Siska sat up, reached reflexively— _I'm doing this wrong, I'm doing this wrong_ —clutched Kostya's hand against his chest. "Please, I'm sorry. Tell me what to do. I don't…I'm sorry Kostya please."

Waking to his own clumsiness, Konstantin shook his head. "Oh no no, moy lyubov, no it's not you, it's. I need. You." Damn it, he'd never had to talk to a calf about _food,_ never needed to explain the imperative, so he tried to ignore the thin skin and sharp bone under his hand, then looked at Siska's belly and whispered, "I need to feed you."

Noise in another language, Siska couldn't parse these words at all. Long deaf to the sounds of his own hunger, he knew only he'd done this wrong, that Kostya was pulling away, that he wasn't _hard._ "Tell me what to do please please."

Ascots in his wardrobe, top hats too, nevertheless Konstantin Levin is not a particularly elegant man, so as if to a fractious calf Kostya dropped his voice to soothing, stroked cheek and neck, and said slow and sweet, "It's all right, I'll be back. Stay where it's warm please, will you? I'll be right back, will you wait for me?" Then bright as a sun Kostya smiled, showing teeth, crinkling eyes.

Very unlike he would do with a calf however, Kostya turned Siska's hand up, bowed his head and kissed his palm once, twice, three times, then without letting go he stood up, naked from top to toes. "I'll be right back, all right?"

Francisco blink-blink-interpreted these words one by one by one, then he lifted Konstantin's hand, kissed the palm, and let him go.

So Kostya went.

*

The daughter of Dolly Alexandrovna Oblonskaya slept fitful in her bed.

Though she has the indomitable will of a mountain, Ludmilla Stepanova Oblonskaya is still only four-years-old and does not sleep well when her mother is away. So little Luda dreamed in that wakeful way which makes everything seem very real.

So Father Francisco Garupe was right this very moment kneeling by her bed and saying prayers with her. She was standing on tip-toe beside him so she could be bigger than he was, and dream Luda was like awake Luda, never noticing that Siska curled himself small so she _could_ be tall. While he talked to god on her behalf, Ludmilla listened to his rumbly voice and with another part of her brain said the words with him.

She is sure her brain must be very big to do two things at once, especially when she sees father hurrying about his bedroom looking in panic for a shoe, or mother distracted when Masha cries and Grisha starts to yell. Unlike them, _she_ can do two things at once, so in her dream Ludmilla listened to Siska talk soft and slow and at the same time she said her prayers.

Then, because this was a dream and anything at all can happen in those, she and Siska were ice skating on the lake and he said, "I have to go now."

In her dream, as she had in real life, Luda said, "Will you come back?"

Her little hands went to Siska's ears as he picked her up, so she directed him round and round the other skaters. "I'll come back," he said, "but I must help Dyadya Kostya awhile. He's all alone, while you have Vasya and Kolya, Tanya and Grisha and Masha. He has no people to play with him."

As she had in real life, dream Luda asked, "Is he sad?" but she didn't let Siska answer, instead with little fists on big ears, she shook his head yes.

The dream changed again and she was standing at the window waving to dyadya's sledge as it pulled away. Siska sat bundled in the back of it, waving and waving to her, and Luda waited until he was gone before she cried.

The dream changed again and again she stood beside her bed, alone this time but still on tip-toes and in the dream she asked God what she asks him when she's awake. "—and make Siska happy and dyadya, too."

Ludmilla Stepanova Oblonskaya mumbled "Amen" into the dark, then dreamed no more than night.

*

The room wasn't quiet. The fire made its conversations, the sharp-sloped roof shed more snow in muffled clumps, and inside his head there was a clatter and hum because Francisco Garupe will never have one bit of trouble filling up his big frame with worry. There's room in that cavernous chest for the flutter of many fears, space in long limbs for a legion of doubts. He's had a double dozen years learning how to dig worry deep into belly and bone, yet after a moment of fear there in Kostya's bedroom, Francisco _stopped._

In that warm room he breathed deep, sat cross-legged on the bed, and looked down at his body. Instead of dwelling on the lies and misconceptions his mind wanted to share in abundance— _you did this wrong, that's why Kostya found no pleasure in you—_ instead of that, Siska remembered.

The sound of Konstantin's moans when he'd had his mouth around his cock, endearments and the press of his face afterward, a ticklish rub of bearded cheeks and chin between Siska's sweaty thighs, and Siska remembered Kostya's words, the said and unsaid.

_It's not you. I take awhile. Sometimes._

"Well then," Siska said to the talkative fire and the mumbling eaves, to the doubt that wanted to dig in and make a home, he'd give Kostya all the _awhile_ he needed.

In swift and profane agreement something thudded just the other side of the door, then rolled noisy across the floor. Konstantin swore amidst the clatter of dishes, then pushed the door wide with his shoulder, slammed it closed with his foot and, stood naked just inside.

For awhile.

Then he drooped and high-voiced crooned with pleasure, "It's so _warm_ in here." A bustle to the foot of the bed to put the tray down, Kostya crossed to the fire, stepped up onto the hearth, and wiggled his toes with a moan of relief.

Francisco had learned in seminary how to be naked among many, but he'd never grown easy with it. Konstantin moved as if his body wasn't bare, as if his naked penis wasn't…rather…looking at his wriggling toes, as—

Kostya crawled up onto the bed laughing and, as if they'd done this a dozen times before, together they gathered a nest of blankets round their hips, weaved their legs together, this long limb under that one, that one round this, until they settled close enough to lean in and kiss.

They didn't.

Instead Konstantin went still, so Francisco did, too. Kostya blinked slow, so Siska did, too. Finally, without looking away Konstantin picked up a tiny pryanik, its cinnamon-scented nooks glazed with sugar, and with the solemnity of the sacred Konstantin Levin said, "This is my body."

He bit the small cake in half and leaned forward.

Father Francisco Garupe knows what communion is, so he opened his mouth to receive the sweet pushed into it by Kostya's tongue, and he chewed. Before he could swallow, Kostya put the other half of the cake in his own mouth and fed him with another urgent push of tongue, his hand at the back of Siska's neck. Again he didn't wait, reached blind for a glass of wine, whispering, "And this is my blood." He filled his mouth, pressed his lips to Siska's and trickled the tart redness into him.

Another tiny half of cake shared from the wet warmth of Konstantin's mouth and into Siska's.

_This is my body._

Another sip of wine, warmed by body heat and drip-dripped between their lips.

_This is my blood._

Pryanik and wine became pryanik, wine, and smeared kisses. Smeared kisses turned into smiling which turned into laughter after wine dripped down Kostya's chin. Or more precisely into the thicket of his beard, and _that_ became a priest hunting for where exactly he should lick, which turned into big hands at a bare neck, thumbs tilting a chin high and…and _sucking_ at a fire-bright beard.

This turned into cackling, which led to _two_ pryanik popped into Kostya's mouth by Siska, and both of them on their knees in the middle of their nest, Siska's mouth open, the biggest of birds grunting eagerly for his food.

So he was fed.

More little cakes and more, halved with teeth sometimes, other times not. Then more wine and more wine, Siska resting back on his heels, head canted so Kostya could spill into him from above. Finally body and blood were mixed together, cinnamon cakes plumped on wine and pushed sloppy from Kostya into Siska, and that's when Francisco finally felt, for the first time in a year, truly hungry, and so help him he made _louder_ noisy noises, a flightless fledgling demanding _more more more!_

"Meu bem…" _More_ Siska insisted with the endearment, and Kostya poured wine into his own mouth until his cheeks swelled, and moaned it into Francisco.

"Querido…" _More_ Siska begged with arms tight round Konstantin's waist, chewing and gulping and chattering his teeth waiting for more.

He didn't know it now, but Siska would never again feel the deep ache of hunger, never again bear his own suffering with patience. From this night forward Siska becomes again what he's always been: Grumbly, strong-willed, vocal about _fixing_ things that are not _fair._

"Querido," Francisco whispered against the soft skin of Kostya's chest, licking the drops of wine there. In reply Siska's darling inelegantly shoved four fingers into the refilled wine glass, then ran them across his skin against which Francisco slurped noisy, so Kostya did it again and in firelight shadows maybe it did look a little like blood.

Siska wanted more of Kostya's body.

Arms wrapped tight he felt the fatness of Konstantin's cock and it was easy, so easy to not let go, to hold tight and tip back, the blankets rucked up everywhich way, but the only thing Francisco felt was Kostya's legs opening either side of his chest and then…

…because here Konstantin has no shame, none at all, Kostya's cock bumped against Siska's chin and then…

_More more more._

…into Siska's mouth

Francisco Garupe closed his eyes, gentled his hands, and started to suck.

Nothing mattered. Not a lifetime denying himself this, not past pains, only this present pleasure. Kostya was vocal, _oh_ and _please_ and _yes_ huffed out in whispers, even laughter because when one of Siska's hands stroked slowly upward, big fingers slotting just a little between the crease of Kostya's ass, it tickled at first and then it didn't.

Always a studious seminary student, again Francisco _studied,_ the first lesson of a lifetime of lessons. How Kostya moved slow and careful, but trusted the pressure of Siska's hands enough to slide _deep._ How Kostya's skinny arms were strong and steady, bearing his own weight. How every time Siska moaned, Kostya did too, until the room was full of their noises. Then, very much, then, how the gentle press of his fingers a little deeper between Kostya's ass made Kostya's whispers go higher, breathier, his hips slow, slower, slowest waiting, waiting, waiting, wanting a finger to—

"Ah!"

—to touch his hole, a tease but much more than enough. He came in Francisco's mouth, warm, and bitter, and _now_ he trembled, legs and belly shivering, but neither of them moved, not until Kostya's pleasure drip-drip-dripped its end into Siska's mouth.

Finally with a sigh he tried sliding down the bed but a knee landed on a hip, a hand lodged under an armpit, and by the time they sorted their long bodies next to each other the solemnity that was creeping up on Siska was given over to giggles and tugging blankets up to necks and no one cared just then about the wreckage of cakes or wine at the foot of the bed, though there was precious little left of either.

Again, natural as a frequent habit, Konstantin gathered Siska's hands up in his own and held them to his chest.

"I imagined you so many time," he said softly. "It seemed so wrong to think of a priest the way I did, but I did it anyway." Siska nibbled his big grin all over Kostya's knuckles. "That was Dolly's plan, I'm sure of it."

Siska giggled, a rumble out of that big chest and half hid his face behind their joined hands.

"She'd told me about you of course. The new tutor come from Japan. She said how wonderful you are with the children, how much they love you. She told me you were young as me, that you were quiet, she said you were handsome."

Konstantin Levin rolled his eyes and shook his head.

"Ah ah ah. She was trying to prepare me you see, but she failed. The first time I saw you I thought…do you know what I thought? 'Oh my god my god but he's _beautiful."_

Siska slid a tongue between Kostya's fingers and felt him shiver. "I didn't expect a priest to look like you. They are always old men even when they're not. They're stern and rounded with the burden of all our sins, I suppose but you. Oh you. So tall, so so big, all your long hair and your eyes soft and dark and Jesus the profane thoughts I had about you!" Konstantin bit his lips at his own sacrilege, then laughed into the warmth between them. "From that very first time I didn't stop thinking about you. Your hands, your voice, when you smiled at the children it went all the way into your eyes and you'd laugh when Luda would do a Luda thing and if I was talking with Dolly or Stiva I'd always lose my train of thought and stare like a cow at nothing until my brain came back to me and I could think again."

Konstantin closed his eyes and sighed as they shifted closer, legs wrapped around legs, belly against belly. "I wondered if you saw me, I wanted you to see me, I would imagine over and over the first time we'd talk. And then when we finally did—not at all the way I thought we would—I imagined much much more than that."

Kostya pulled their joined hands to his chest again, grinned and ran his fingers along Siska's cheek and ear and mouth.

"I did too, so very much," Francisco said, an understatement Kostya would soon understand.

In Japan he'd imagined so much, had Siska. When he and Sebastião were huddled in dark places far from Nagasaki, afraid or bored or lonely, Siska'd close his eyes and see the man he used to be.

Vain about his hair always, looking too long in the mirror of a morning, there in a cold shack on the side of a hill Siska'd remember his sisters braiding him a crown of black plaits then weaving flowers into the braids, only to take them all out before anyone saw, old-fashioned men and women telling them what boys and girls should be.

In those dark drip-drip nights Siska would imagine his books, so many on the shelves of every room in which he's ever lived, because even the ones he'd not read yet were precious, giving off a warmth he could feel in his big bones. His mother, whose mind and hands were never still, had for years found diversion in gardens, painting azulejos, and finally in embroidery, making bookmarks in bright colours for each and every book her children owned. When he left for seminary and could take little, Francisco packed dozens and dozens of those bookmarks, each a memory of his mother and the precious book to which it had belonged.

Even more than these, in those anxious Japanese nights Siska imagined food. He'd think about his grandmother's home-made Madeira, his grandfather's fat tomatoes sliced with peppery cheese. He'd imagine pastéis de natas and being full, dozing on his avó's balcony, belly gently swollen and the sun on his face. Even when he was still Francisquinho to everyone, Siska understood the grace of small pleasures and _found_ the grace in everyday things. Maybe it was why he'd become a priest.

Siska had imagined more than food in those months in Japan. He'd imagined men.

In seminary the lanky teenagers like himself had grown into adulthood, each boy blossoming into his own sort of beauty. Cássio's newly-long legs and sharp cheekbones put Siska in mind of a prince, Nicolau's broad shoulders made Francisco's mouth dry. The Irish twins Ronan and Kieran, always sitting so close their hips pressed together, had suddenly given rise to thoughts his nineteen-year-old self found shameful.

A Nagasaki prison had destroyed in Siska that sort of shame.

So from the very day he'd met Kostya he'd imagined _so_ much, though never of being touched with reverence or kissed as if he were sacred.

"I imagined you naked, in the summer sun," he said, cheeks flushing not with embarrassment but want. "The sun, I was always imagining you in the sun. I'd wonder if you had red hair on your chest—"

Konstantin giggled and they both looked down as he circled one of his own nipples with a finger. "I have two somewhere near here and none on the other side. Possibly I imagined even those two though."

"I imagined touching you all over," Siska grinned, "imagined you were pale everywhere, like cream."

He ran his fingers down Kostya's spine, grateful he could feel no bones. His love was a soft sort of slim. "That day you sang to Mariya when she wouldn't settle for her nurse, I don't know in what language was the lullaby but it was soft and you were…" Francisco closed his eyes and smiled. "…an angel. After that you would sing that song to me before I'd sleep."

"Where?"

"Mmmm?"

"Where would I sing to you, where would we be?"

Siska smiled and said, "Between our bodies, our mouths would be close together and you would—" He took Kostya's hand and placed it on his neck, and that was that. Konstantin began to sing a Polish lullaby.

"A-a-a, a-a-a, byly sobie kotki dwa. A-a-a, kotki dwa, szarobure, szarobure obydwa.

"Ach, śpij, kochanie, jesli gwiazdke z nieba chcesz - dostaniesz. Wszystkie dzieci, nawet źle, pogrążone są we śnie, a ty jedna tylko nie."

As he sang Kostya stroked the back of Siska's neck, watched in fascination as goosebumps rose and skittered across mole-freckled shoulders and chest.

"A-a-a, a-a-a, byly sobie kotki dwa. A-a-a, kotki dwa, szarobure, szarobure obydwa.

"Ach, śpij, bo wlaśnie księżyc ziewa i za chwilę zaśnie. A gdy rano przyjdzie świt księzycowi będzie wstyd, ze on zasnąl, a nie ty."

As he sang a lullaby about the moon and kittens and sleep, Kostya stroked a finger into the notch of Siska's neck, then down his chest and round nipples, then laughed as if he could read some sort goosebump language and Siska had said something funny.

"The song is about—"

He looked up then and saw a tear running down the side of Siska's nose. Belatedly he felt the erratic beat of Francisco's heart beneath his hand. "Moy lyubov, moy lyubov, what's wrong?"

Siska said nothing, barely breathed. He'd learned to cry quiet long ago, when tears became ammunition for an enemy, though the enemy was often himself.

"Moy lyubov, moy lyubov," Kostya whispered soft and softer, a new lullaby for his love. "Moy lyubov."

Pulling the blankets up high, high, high, Kostya wiggled himself this way, then that, until Siska's forehead pressed against his chest. Gathering that big body close Konstantin sang.

"A-a-a, a-a-a, a-a-a, a-a-a…"

—  
_SHOUTY NOISES OF SHOUTING! Pan has drawn glorious artwork for this chapter and the kisses? They are **[wine soaked](https://twitter.com/StarseedComic/status/1245805242278711296).** Thank you Pan! Also, also! Moy lyubov means 'my love,' and here is that [Polish lullaby](https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=668), and [Jan Lewan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Hr7uUZeq8) singing it to his grandson. Also: I DO NOT WANT THIS STORY TO END._


	13. Simply, Just, and Only

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Francisco Garupe is asked to live in the barn with Kostya's cows, sleep on bales of hay, then harness himself to a plow come morning and till fields so he can be with this man, Siska will do those things. 
> 
> Kostya has a better plan.

Agafya Mikhailovna Yelagina looked at the mess in the kitchen.

Two empty bottles of wine stood on the counter, beside them a half-eaten vareniki sat in congealed butter, and on a tray were remnants of pryanik and low glasses stained with wine.

Agafya looked to the ceiling, but heard no movement or murmurs. The last time Konstantin Dmitrievich had slept past daybreak he'd been so ill he could do little more than sip the broth she brought him. She knew why he was still abed today, though she didn't want to know.

Agafya frowned out the kitchen window and remembered holding her first grandchild, stillborn, her daughter nearby and silent as the babe. In those weeks and months after Agafya reminded Feodosia that faith was rarely convenient, obedience often not a comfort, but God asked of us both. Still Dosha never forgave god and turned from the rituals and commandments she'd always known. She pretends piety for her children, now that god has granted them to her, but Agafya alone knows Dosha is no longer among the faithful.

And now _this._ She looked to the ceiling again. _More_ knowledge to hold to her breast, _more_ prayers to say at night. Fine. _Fine._

Scowling Agafya put the empty wine bottles onto the tray, careful glass did not touch glass. Grumbling softly she scooped crumbs onto a plate. And on angry tip-toe she moved round the kitchen in absolute silence so that Konstantin Dmitrievich would not wake. If that meant a priest who had proved too weak to keep faith also slept…well that was the will of god and lord knew she would not question that.

Snatching up one of her own pryanik, Agafya swallowed it down with hot coffee. Her frown lessened a little.

*

Francisco Garupe woke, curled under the blankets, his forehead pressed to Konstantin Levin's bare back.

He stayed perfectly still but for a toothy grin because, for the first time in a long time, Siska woke without his unholy trinity of anxiety, hunger, and an erection. Instead he was giddy, satiated, and soft.

Four months in Russia had blunted the anxiety, now more gum than gumption. When he'd wake to a sound with his heart skittering against his ribs, the high voice of an Oblonsky child calling would remind him he was safe. This morning he'd woke simply because…he woke. And without another companion.

Privation had taken over fifty pounds from his frame, just ten of which have returned, because somehow eating felt like fighting demons. Last night though, something untangled in him and he could swallow down, down, down everything given to him.

Then there was the erections. In his missions to India and Ireland and Turkey he had no time or inclination for desire. Then in Japan there was so much hiding and so little of everything else that imagination became a refuge and desire a lifeline. Many mornings he'd stay turned from Sebastião, waiting until an erection went away.

This morning he woke flaccid and, as he's done since he was little, woke buried under the bedclothes and to the humid heat trapped there.

Until last night Francisco had never made love to woman nor man so the scent left by two bodies which have sweated, pleasured, and _been_ pleasured…it was new to him and it was _divine._ He took breath after breath, trying to find words to define the scent, because Siska's good with words, a priest has to be. How else to explain to parents that God only ever gave us trials for a _purpose,_ that he did things only for our good?

Though his belief in those truths has withered away to anger, Siska's facility with words hasn't. And yet…

What _was_ the scent of skin against which spit and come has dried, against which kisses have been smeared and no small about of wine? Earthy? Ripe? Sweet? All of those or none? Maybe he has to learn new words, maybe it—

"Tickles."

Siska stopped the huffing he didn't know he'd started and kissed smiles on to Kostya's skin as he turned.

"Oh! You're hiding." Konstantin uncovered Francisco's head and brushed black hair back, a new ritual soon to become old. "Did you sleep well," he said softly, "you were up in the night."

"I slept like I was a boy again and my mother over-indulgent of my lazy bones." His bladder had needed relief in the night, but so had the rest of him. He'd felt twitchy with the _ease_ in his limbs, so he'd put on his clothes and crept downstairs. There Siska wandered the old rooms, smiling at moonlight, at the empty glass on Kostya's desk, at the embers of banked fires. He pressed his forehead to Kostya's. "You were up too."

"Bringing the tray downstairs and your things up to one of the bedrooms. Yours is the one with the paper snowflake on the door. Agafya's granddaughters made dozens of them last Christmas and yours is the only one that's lasted." Kostya had rumpled the bedclothes in that room too, and knew soon he'd have to have a dozen thoughts about their how, and who, and what. For now he pushed those away like a tangle of hair, and kissed a mole-dappled forehead. "And I wanted to make a fire and bring us up some lovely things, before…" Again he didn't want to think about who they'd have to be for other people's eyes.

Instead he said the three little words that would so often mean to Siska, _I love you._ "Please, come eat."

As Siska rose Kostya tutted at the bruises on his hipbones, legacy of last night's panic, then tutted him into his own nightclothes, he tutted him in front of the fire too, and Francisquinho, Kiko, the boy beloved of his avó, the pampered brother of two sisters, well it didn't occur to Siska to question any of this. Instead he peered into the warm mug Kostya had put in his hands and wondered what was wrong with the coffee in it. It looked greasy, it's—

"Butter."

Kostya placed a blanket over Siska's legs, and a breakfast tray on the hearth. "There's butter in the coffee to keep bones warm on cold days, and meat on them through the winter." Sitting on the hearth Kostya drew the tray against his hip, put a thick slice of bread on a plate, and poured melted butter over it. He put sliced green apple beside it and then poured honey, thinned by its proximity to the flames, over these. There was cream in a small pitcher and Kostya added it to a cup of coffee, then absolutely and actually took the cup Siska held _right out of his hands._

"This one is hot," Konstantin said by way of explanation but no, nope, the thick coffee was no hotter than what Siska'd already had, but it was _thick_ with fatty cream and this would be another _I love you_ and, like the first, Francisco would not question it, just as he didn't question Kostya pulling a chair up beside his, placing the plate of fruit and bread on his own knees, and saying, "Open."

Siska opened.

His mouth—soon filled with sweet bread and tart apples. His heart—likewise filled with quiet praise. When the bread and apples were gone Siska opened his body too—to Kostya's tongue and kisses. They were both hard by the time Kostya crawled onto his lap, where a knee was tucked here, a sash unknotted there, and finally Siska took them both in hand and _stroked._

They whispered endearments, whimpered pleasure, Konstantin watched Siska's face go slack as he came, Francisco saw Kostya's lashes flutter when he did. They wiped up the mess between them messily, and afterward Siska pressed the sticky robe to his nose. Kostya, who has gone days with manure beneath his fingernails and once got the slick of a cow's afterbirth in his mouth, he made dainty horrified sounds until Siska stuck his big nose into Kostya's hair, his ear, his mouth, and _sniffed._

Konstantin cackled and wriggled, and fell with a thud to the floor, then just as quick he sat up and _shushed._ "Shhhh! We're not alone!" he hissed, because no matter how much he means to think necessary thoughts _later,_ Kostya can't help but think them now. "My god Agafya will be mortified!"

Francisco Garupe is a priest, no matter how fallen. He's comforted the dying, counseled the suffering, and prayed for the wicked, so he does not in this life expect ease. If he is asked to live in the barn with Kostya's cows, sleep on a haycock, then harness himself to a plow come morning and till fields so he can be with this man, Siska will do those things. He will also smile at his noisy lover, then he'll comfort and counsel. "Your Agafya certainly already knows meu bem."

Hair a bed-head nest, robe fallen from both white shoulders, and belly still damp with his lover's come, Kostya lifted a scandalised chin. "Agafya Mikhailovna has lived on this farm since my mother was a child and she herself barely ten years older. She doesn't go to Moscow or tearooms or to court."

Francisco frowned. "And so? Stepan Oblonsky comes here yes?" He tilted his head, a teacher awaiting the correct answer, then nodded at Kostya's nod. "When he's here he talks of his conquests, yes? Gossips about his own sister and what happened with that count, yes?" Another nod. "Then certainly he has whispered of men like us."

Only a month ago, gossip and guffaws about a foreign prince and a Russian cavalry officer. Then a year or two before that and then before that and for all the years he's known Stiva, amusement at the stories of men who loved men, scorn whether there was proof or not. And Konstantin always said nothing.

"She knows who you are, meu bem."

Siska slid from his chair, took his lover's hands, and he confessed, and confessed, and confessed. "All my life as a priest I was told of the glories of martyrdom. Those were the words—glorious martyrdom. The idea of anything else, of losing faith, of becoming apostate, was utterly unimaginable, a mockery of everything we knew to be true, inviolate, worth _dying_ for. I believed all of this without question.

"Without. Question. Kostya. Ask no questions and it is others who make up your mind. This is seductive because it is easy.

"You and Dolly and your friends, you come from a world where people like me are peasants and you don't question the fact that somehow that means _simple._ But we see as much as you do and we know more because people in high places don't see _us._ So they talk. I am a confessor twice, did you know? As a priest the low and the high bring me their sins, but as a celibate man in black…somehow I am invisible wherever I go so men gossip beside me in the market, talking of an old classmate they saw recently and oh didn't he grow pretty? They whisper desires right there because I'm invisible to them.

"Do you think your Agafya is any different? Unseen because she is 'just' or 'only' or 'simply' a peasant and so like me she has heard your friend Oblonsky gossip and mock. She knows much because to some she is never even _there."_

It's true Kostya's always thought of peasants as less complex than himself, but he's also thought them more. More kind, more strong. Perhaps it's time he thinks them no worse nor better, simply, just, and only human. Like him.

Which is a good thought, yes, but Kostya still lives in a world where who he loves matters, to rich and to poor, and he knows that _whatever_ people like Agafya know, in many ways he and Siska will forever have to hide who they are.

He also knows a way they can do that.

"Siska? Siska.

"I want to build a church."

—  
_I believe in inertia. For every Oscar Wilde, accused, tried, and jailed, for every horror story of suffering because a man is gay or a women strong…I believe ten times as much in the inertia of the shrug. The neighbour who suspects a man is one of 'those' or a thinks a woman 'uppity,' but can't be bothered because their child is sick, their field needs plowing, or 'it has nothing to do with me.' In a world of suffering I don't think we need to tell only stories of court cases and oppression; we can tell stories that will never be in newspapers, stories of people living quiet lives of difference amongst the conformity because their neighbours just can't be bothered. This is how I'm telling the story of Siska and his Kostya._


	14. Safe Harbour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Safe harbours are where we find them or they are where we are willing to work to make them. 
> 
> If Francisco Garupe can not make his own, well Magda Garupe is more than fit for digging.

Magda Máiréad Murphy Garupe loved Russia and she'd not even set foot on it.

The ship had finally left the Baltic Sea, rounded the hump of Estonia, and the cold wind blustering across ship's deck for the last week had got colder and colder, sharping right down into Magda's big bones. The steward had pointed to the towers of St Petersburg and promised colder weather still, and this glorious news had kept Magda smiling toothily at everyone on board.

She's bad with heat, is Magda, though her avó says it's unladylike to complain. That's never stopped Magda from grumping at Lili and Kiko during long Lisbon summers, through which her sister and brother have always remained cool as the azulejos in a shadowy church.

Staring over the dark water, imagining she can see all the way to the house in which her brother now lives, Magda thinks of Kiko and prays that at least some of the lies in his letters to mammy and papai are true.

They had all been terrified they'd lost him. After a year of hearing nothing and fearing everything, suddenly so many letters had come nearly all at once.

The first hadn't been _from_ him, but about him. It had come from Macao and was so formal, so careful; the nurse who had written it discussed "your dear Father Garupe" almost as if he had died.

It was only through subsequent letters, arriving in fits and starts after that first one, that they learned he nearly had. Each short note was signed _Sister Loi_ and she told them Kiko was growing well in body, but was still so sick in spirit.

They all wrote back to him, the entire family, even avó, with her poor eyesight. Then Kiko's own letters began to come and they told a different story from his nurse. He wrote to each of them, as he always had when he went on missions, loving letters to avó, their mam and papai, but to her and Lili, he always shared his heart and so their letters had sadder words. "I wish…" he wrote, "If only…" he wrote, "Nothing is what I thought it would be," he wrote and wrote and wrote in a dozen different ways.

Mady frowned at the cold sea in a way very ladylike thank-you-so-much. A lady was nothing more than a woman in possession of her own mind and therefore Mady felt that her frowns, her burps, every elbow she'd ever jabbed into Kiko's ribs when they teased each other, were therefore ladylike. Avó was never convinced, but in the end that didn't matter.

Whatever it was or was not that ladies did, Magda's family knew she was the one who would go to Kiko when the invitation came from the Oblonskys. Mam and papai and avó were not up to the journey and Liliana was a homebody to her core, and would marry soon. Magda was none of those things and besides, Kiko was hers. They'd come into the world together and though mam never told who'd been born first, Magda long ago claimed seniority and so the right to be her brother's protector.

"Mais _rápido."_

Though she willed it, the vast boat approached the vast country of Russia no faster, so her journey to Moscow was still to come.

She wondered if her brother could sense how close she was at last, wondered if she could help him with their same old ponderings and philosophies, words murmured on late nights and over the tops of books, words which he swore had helped him find the focus and bravery he needed to travel the world for his faith. He'd made them all so proud, their own Father Garupe.

He'd written to both her and Lili of the Oblonskys, of their children, of the family's friends. "I want you to know them, Dolly and Ludmilla and Konstantin."

 _They,_ he wrote to her, just to her, _they saved me._

*

As the ship settled into St. Petersburg's safe harbour, the lowering sun turned the water a gem-blue, and the snow on St Petersburg's towers silver. Magda would board a train to Moscow day after tomorrow and hopefully see her brother before the end of the week. She was so very close now.

And nervous.

Nervous about seeing Kiko after so long, nervous about _what_ she would see. He had not spared her his circumstances after Japan. Of all the people in all the world she was his as much as he was hers and he'd never lied to her in fact or by omission.

So Magda was afraid to see her beloved boy frail from suffering. She was afraid he wouldn't _argue_ or complain, that he'd be hushed, like their papai usually was. His nature always kept their father quiet even in the middle of his loud family, all three of his children taking after their Irish mam and her boisterous ways.

But Kiko had always had some of their father's stillness at the very edges of him, and Mady feared past miseries might have dimmed his fire, dulled the spark in his eyes.

Except.

_They saved me._

This Russian woman, Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya, Kiko wrote of her in terms glowing. "She is at once put upon and long-suffering as she is resilient and strong-willed."

Apparently in a house noisy with six children, a profligate husband, a half dozen servants, and a parrot, Dolly Oblonskaya was able to extend compassion to a churchless priest, making him not only welcome but _warm_ in her busy home.

As with Russia, Mady loved Dolly already and knew she'd have to contain her natural tendency to _say_ rather than see. She spent much of her voyage observing Russian women so she could speak to Mrs Oblonskaya in a way proper. Yes. Proper. That was a thing she would be. She would. _She would._

Mady made no such promises about her behaviour around little Luda, with whom Kiko was clearly besotted. "I promise you, she is seven foot tall inside that tiny four-year-old frame, she has her father's volubility and her mother's strength, but she is a force far beyond them, beyond even pontiff or prefeito!"

Though Magda had been a weepy child at the same age, she'd grown (and grown) into a temperament to fit her big body. She looked forward to meeting this small dynamo for herself but also because her brother loved her so.

Kiko does not lie, not in fact or by omission, so about Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin—"They use all of their names! I'm still getting used to that."—Magda Máiréad Murphy Garupe knows more than anyone else what he means to her Francisquinho.

Of all the people in this vast country she was about to enter, Konstantin Levin—"He calls me Siska and I call him Kostya"—was the one about whom she was most curious.

Kiko had never said so much by saying so little as he has done in his letters to her this last year.

"I believe in something again Mady. These people who have cared for me when I could not care for myself, they are not abstract and I do not have to take them on faith. They are real as sweet red apples that nourish the body.

"They have saved my soul as much as my body, Konstantin most of all, and if that is sacrilege I accept my damnation."

Magda Garupe, her brother's twin by blood, shook her head because she was not quite his twin in spirit. "You self-serious idiota. Damnation is made by stupid men, do not make it for yourself."

Magda watched the last of the light turn the water orange, watched porters run past her.

When she finally stepped on Russian soil she grinned wide and shivered, but not from the cold. Good things were coming, she felt it. As we make our own damnation, surely we make our own salvation, too.

"Tell me Konstantin Dmitrievich, are _you_ a savior?"

*

As dawn pinked the sky the next morning, wrapped tight in his second best winter coat, old biscuits filling its pockets, Konstantin Levin tromped through the snow and toward his chicken coop. If he'd heard Mady Garupe, Kostya Levin would have answered his lover's sister with a question. 

"Will he let me be?"

—  
_While I don't think of Magda as Phasma or Gwendoline Christie, she is very definitely Gwendoline's size and strength of will. Happy new year all!_


	15. Coop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite a lengthy mental conversation, Kostya's chickens do not seem to have words of wisdom for Siska.

Francisco Lorcán Murphy Garupe did not yet know how close his sister was. Or Kostya either.

He was out in a Russian winter, in boots not fit for purpose, standing by a marvelously-constructed chicken coop, wearing something Kostya had called his 'wedding coat.'

Siska knew the wedding of Kitty Shcherbatsky and Konstantin Levin did not happen, but knew little else despite Dolly's gossip, despite his eager ears tilted toward her for weeks, filling up with words like _engagement_ and _not meant to be_ and _better for them both._

So Siska knew only that this long, fur-lined coat he had borrowed from Kostya was made for a honeymoon that never occurred, that in the Russian way it was made for layers to be worn beneath, and so it easily spanned Siska's shoulders and his simple black shirt.

Siska scowled. He still wore black, so much black, too much. And he harped relentlessly of _angels._ No wonder Kostya looked at him and thought of _churches._

"Angels," Siska hissed at the chicken making low broody sounds at him. He hadn't known until this morning that some chickens will lay eggs in winter. He didn't know he would offer to get them so he could escape. He did know Kostya kills these chickens and cattle with his own hands, had heard him talk with Dolly.

Siska has never done that, never used his hands to take the life of a living thing. No, his big hands—people say that, blurt without thinking 'your hands are so big' because somehow that surprises them, they who see so little of his body—his hands have never rung the life out of a breathing creature.

So no, no, _no_ Francisco did not bind those Christians in straw mats before pushing them into the sea. He did not tie the devout to crosses mounted in the Ariake's rising tide. So why is he hiding out of sight of Kostya's rambling house, scowling because he knows these broody little birds may be destined for Konstantin's dinner table? That is what a farmer does after all, he kills so he can live.

He hides because he has too.

They had thought they had a choice those first months in Japan. He and Sebastião had been convicted of the rightness of what they were doing, never understanding that rightness is not right _everywhere._ From the start they had not been priests to the Japanese magistrates, they'd been an invasion force. After so many years in seminary, how had he never noticed the universal truth of this—always before the armies come, the priests arrive first.

For so long he and Sebastião had hid above tiny villages, passed so many midnights listening to confessions, performing mass and baptisms. They believed their cause was just and so every time they were caught, given the chance to apostate in exchange for the lives of the Japanese Christians, they refused.

So people died. And they died. By _their hands_ they died. And he and Sebastião starved down to bones.

A brown hen, fat with fluffed feathers, fussed loud. Siska knelt down as she dug in dirt free of snow, pecking at whatever lived in the cold ground. Kostya would kill her and her sisters through the long winter, and so his lean body would stay nourished, strong, and just a little bit soft.

"I want to build a church."

Siska could hear the words clear as day, intense and eager, a benediction, a solution. He could hear his own silence and wondered now, had he smiled in response? He must have smiled because Konstantin had gone on in that way he could, passionate, excited, taken with the vibrancy of a thing, sure that with the right words or work a problem—like being a man in love with a man—could be simply solved.

Solved by building a church for a priest, on land already dotted with cattle barns and hay sheds and slaughter houses, build a church for his lover of one single day.

"—and the nearby farms, of course. They'd all have a place to worship then," he'd chattered after Siska smiled, he must have smiled, he must have nodded and encouraged, because that's what he does in the confessional, beside a death bed, he persuades a man to more words, a woman to ease, Francisco _listens._

"—in Kalinov meadow I think, because it's close enough to the house and not far from Sviyazhsky's and old Yermil's farms. The nearest church is more than an hour's journey from here so I imagine your congregation could be well over a hundred Siska, with more than a double dozen children!"

Kostya had shined so _bright_ with his plans. Forgetting _shhhh,_ grinning out the window, gaze dancing across snowy hillocks as if he saw the church right out there in the sun, he talked about "how perfect and wonderful" things would be, and he promised "you can make it everything you want, however you want, we'll build the perfect place."

He'd come back to Siska, still knelt by the fire, took his hands. "We can go to Kiev next week if you like. There are beautiful wooden churches there. I remember a tiny one, so many onion domes painted silver, it looked like it belonged in a fairytale. Shall we do that? Do you want to see? Or we could build one in the Portuguese way if you like. With azulejos like you mentioned." Konstantin's eyes had danced while he waited for his sweetheart to chatter the air full with praise and his own plans.

But Francisco didn't say, "No, no, no. I do not deserve a church, I do not _want_ a church. Can't you hear it, in all the holy places? The silence. I never realised how silent until I stopped praying the air busy, until I walked up to an altar alone and sensed nothing at all.

"No my love, I do not want a church," Siska did not say. Instead he'd run his hands over Konstantin's shoulders until his robe fell away, and he kissed the bared skin, absolutely lying without words.

"Uuuur."

Francisco looked down. When had he knelt in the snow? When had he pulled up weedy tufts and pushed them through the bars of the coop?

Twelve chickens pranced in front of him now, _uuuuring_ for more greens. Reflexively he tugged up tough shoots growing round the edges of the coop and fed it to the broody hens, forgetting that after lies by omission, after kisses that had turned to gentle bites on white skin, they had together created lies of protection. Kostya had gone down to Agafya, and Siska had gone to the bedroom that had the snowflake on the door, and he'd sat on the bed, in a cold room with no fire, and waited for twenty minutes, waited for Konstantin to 'accidentally' drop a wooden tray and 'I'll swear to the rafters, which will wake you up!'

Agafya Mikhailovna Yelagina had not looked Francisco in the eye when he came down the stairs, not once, because of course she knew what Konstantin wanted to think she did not, but she did talk to him, a few words about coffee, another few words about a fire in his room. Then she'd handed him a basket and Kostya had said, too brightly, "Yes! Eggs! You could see if any of the hens have laid!"

It was then he'd been given Kostya's coat and a fur-lined hat too small for his head, and now here he was, on his knees beside a chicken coop shaped like some fancy building, scowling at chickens he knows he could never kill, that he could never be a farmer, that he will never again be a priest, and so what is the good of him, what—

"—are you doing love?"

Francisco looked up and maybe he would have said many things, just maybe. "I am not worth what you want to risk or give," he might have said but didn't. "I'm afraid you don't understand at all," he might have said but didn't. "I would rather learn about these chickens than teach anyone about god." He could have said that, too.

Francisco Garupe could have said any of a number of things muddling his head and his heart, but he held the gaze of the single brown hen that had not left him when Kostya approached, fed her grass from his fingers and would have just kept lying with silence but Kostya did his Kostya thing and so Kostya _fretted._

"The latch for the coop is over here, I'm sorry I didn't say. Come, let's get you up and out of that snow before you get cold my love."

Too much, too much, too much.

Siska stood and smiled his stupid fake smile and saw Kostya seeing there was something wrong with it, but Konstantin held out his hand anyway…then put it in his pocket when Siska didn't take it. "Eggs," he said brightly, unlatching and holding open the coop door. Siska followed him inside, then into the hen house, where he said "warm," in soft surprise.

Scattering old biscuits on the ground until the hens gathered at their feet, Kostya said, "Isn't it lovely? They're tiny, but their small bodies create comfort."

After the last crumbs had fallen to the ground, Konstantin pulled a small napkin from his pocket, opened it to show a handful of dried apricots. He took one, bit half, and then came close to hold the other half near Siska's mouth.

In the shadows of the hen house Siska couldn't see Konstantin's bright eyes or much of his smile, so it was easier to talk than it would have been.

"Please stop caring about me. Stop whispering sweet things when I have nothing but complaints. I am not nice or good and you will not like me when I'm well and _worse._ Please. Just."

Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin's half brother Sergei Ivanovich is a smart idiot, so vain with his own intelligence, but brilliant all the same. Konstantin's other brother, Nicolai Dmitrievich, grew into a fretful, angry man who wanted Kostya's love so much that he decided he wasn't worthy of it, so he fought and spit and pushed his brother away before the tuberculosis took him.

Kostya himself had been all of these things—stupid, bright, quarrelsome, and angry—with his father, with Agafya, with Kitty. So Kostya would do now for Siska what others have done for him.

He'd let him alone awhile. _After_ doing two other things.

The first was to tell him, "There's a telegram for you. Your sister will be in Moscow soon."

Siska nodded; he had been waiting for Magda for so many weeks. Why did it feel like she was too late?

The second thing Kostya did was step closer and put his arms around Francisco lightly, then more firmly when he hugged back. "I like all the parts of you. Like I hope you'll like all the parts of me."

Kostya Levin stepped back, kissed Siska's hand, then let it go and turned to the hens. The big brown hen uuurrred at him. "Hello Blue, do you have an egg for us?"

—  
 _I wanted Francisco to be well on his way to healing already, but you know what? That's not how healing works—predictably, quickly, or courtesy of someone else._ _So I apologise for more angst. This story_ is _about healing, but also about the doubts and obstacles we put in our own way. Just so you know, next chapter Kostya's gonna have a very interesting answer for Siska, and realise a thing or two about Magda._


	16. Excitement and Dread

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein a sister worries for her brother, and adventure wars with what's to come.

The Russian forests loomed over the train like dark giants.

That was Magda Máiréad Murphy Garupe's first thought as the Petersburg train headed toward Moscow.

Her second was awe at the brightness of the winter sun on the snow.

Magda's third thought was an emotion, and that was delight at the houses she saw from the train, their tiny gardens growing prettier and prettier the closer they got to Moscow. Occasionally someone would glance up as the train passed and Mady would wave a bit, though she knew she wouldn't be seen.

Magda Garupe's final thought as the train pulled in to Moscow had nothing to do with delight and everything to do with excitement and dread.

Dread because she felt a year's worth of worry suddenly settle on her shoulders again. The sheer adventure of her trip to Russia, the care her family had placed in her hands, these had made Mady straight-backed strong on the sea journey, but now that her booted feet stood firm on Russian ground, now that she was so close, Magda understood that though this might be _her_ adventure, for Kiko it was something else.

 _You need not come,_ he'd written months ago, when she wrote him she'd received an invitation to do just that.

 _But I want to,_ she'd written back. _I want to meet your little Miss Luda and Miss Dolly and your precious Mr Kostya. And I miss you Kiko, so much._

In the end he said nothing more about _not,_ so the plans had moved slowly ahead and now here she was amidst what felt like all of Moscow milling on the train platform.

The dread was slow to leave her, the feeling that she would find a man broken by what had happened to him in Japan, though in mind's eye she could barely see him as he'd told her he was, skinny now and serious.

Her Kiko was big as a house, all shoulder and leg, taking after their mam's family, farmers all who'd tended rocky fields not far from Dublin, farmers the famine had sent in search of work across the world. And like those grandparents who'd landed in Lisbon, like the ones they'd all once visited in Ireland, her Kiko was happy by nature, so she feared finding he really was so very changed.

Eventually the crowded platform became a little less so, rich women in finery, fancy men in uniforms finding their way to waiting carriages. That left people more like her, in regular dresses and sensible shoes, wide-eyed and—

There! A flash of orange two dozen feet away!

Fears tucked themselves away and excitement again flooded Magda's big bones. This was real, she was in _Russia,_ and soon she would see Kiko, nearly two long years after he'd gone away. Whether he suffered still or no, Mady knew she would be what she always was for him and he for her, a solace, strength, part of his soul in times both bad and good.

Magda nearly ran toward that promised glimpse of brightness, her heart in her throat and a smile big as anything across her face. "Hello!" she said, and knew she'd found the one who'd sent the telegram to her Moscow hotel, promising to come for her. "I'm Mady, I'm Kiko's—I'm Francisco Garupe's sister Magda. Thank you, thank you so much for coming."

Mady was unsurprised by the hug she received right away, not realising it wasn't the well-born Russian way, so she hugged back hard as anything despite the slender body in her arms, grateful and over-eager and not ashamed to admit to both.

"I'm so excited to be here, to see him. Is he well? Does he eat? Is he happy? I know you can't know all of these things, I'm sorry, I'm sorry! But I'm so grateful you'll take me to him, thank you so much."

"Oh it's really my privilege. I've so very much to tell you on our journey to the house, there's so much you should know."

The woman in the hat with the wide orange ribbon, the woman once engaged to marry Konstantin Levin smiled, and she said, "And please, call me Kitty."


	17. About Midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At a little past midnight Konstantin Levin and Francisco Garupe look at the same moon… 
> 
> …and find their way to the very same place.

The day after he left Konstantin's farm and the night before Magda arrived, Francisco Garupe slept poorly.

It wasn't because the house of Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya was too noisy. Though Stiva was still in Petersburg and Dolly, baby Masha, and toddler Grisha still away in Sochi, even with half the family away the house was raucous with the four remaining children, their wants, their needs, their nannies.

Besides, noise has never bothered Francisco so he wasn't awake because Nikolai had beat his once-lost and now very-much-found drum right outside Vasilisa's door, nor because Ludmilla had walked back and forth outside _his,_ singing until Her Favourite Person—whom she'd thought gone _for_ ever—came out to help her with her evening prayers. It wasn't even excitement at the almost-here arrival of his beloved sister.

No, Francisco slept poorly since being back from Kostya's farm because _he was back from Kostya's farm._

And oh how he'd done everything so wrong.

He'd spoken when he shouldn't and was silent when he should speak. He let passing words— _beautiful_ and _gorgeous_ —mean too much, and sweet words— _beautiful_ and _gorgeous_ —he couldn't believe.

And yet.

Konstantin had spoken of building a church and Siska knew it wasn't because he was suddenly spiritual. In bed together that night, dozy and curled close, Kostya had had so many thoughts and poured them out in the long dark.

"—and I'm not faithful enough and I've never been very sorry about that until now. Do you think you can care for someone who sometimes only remembers god on holy days?"

It hadn't really been a question, just a confession followed by the penitence of kisses to his lover's warm hands, _one two three four,_ each knuckle in turn and then a soft laugh as he twisted this way and that to get at Siska's thumb.

So no, Kostya had no proposed a church as something to go along with the threshing and conditioning sheds, the granary and the coops already on his land. A church was not for the farm.

A church was meant for him.

And somehow in a long night of words, amidst Kostya's confessions and kisses, Francisco had never got to say that he did not believe any more.

How could he when he'd talked about angels like someone in love with the diving? How could Konstantin know that though he still answered to father, though he taught little Russian children child-sized theology, he said the words by rote, knowing now that freedom didn't come from faith, there was no glory in martyrdom, and god was as he had always been—silent.

Francisco Lorcán Murphy Garupe wanted so badly to go back and say what he hadn't and _that_ was what kept him awake. He wanted to be in Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin's quiet house and not be quiet.

What is a priest after all but words? However fallen he is, however ruined and wrong, he owns still the collar and the vestments, he still _looks_ like such a man and what do such men do if not _talk?_

Hours a day, every day, for nearly all his grown years, he has spoken from the heart _about_ the heart, about being human and wanting, finding, hoping. How, when he finally felt a weight lifted from every limb at the touch of Kostya's hands could he have said so little exactly when it would have meant so much?

The house slept deep. Ludmilla was long asleep after prayers said on tip-toe, Nikolai had been persuaded to put down the drum, and so there were no distractions to these thoughts going round and round.

Though they weren't the only thoughts Siska had, no they were not.

In his bed, in a quiet house just past midnight, Francisco Garupe felt his face go warm and his heart beat fast when he carefully-slowly-lightly rested his hands on his belly. He knew, he absolutely knew, they would not stay there.

_Forgive me Father._

He'd prayed that long ago as a teenager, looking at other boys and not understanding what his body was doing, only that it felt good and bad both.

He still prayed, did Siska, but this time he asked to go back and say the right things, shouting _yes_ and _more_ and _you Kostya, you._

Because Russia is itself, so big and so _much,_ because there was snow on the ground and a moon hung low making midnight bright, Siska glanced down and he so easily saw his hand moving beneath the blankets, sliding, sliding…touching.

The covers rucked up, showing clearly that he was opening his legs, beneath them taking hold of himself.

Big, big, big, Francisco's chest was a cavern from which great rumblings could come but since shooting up tall, voice dropping low, since _desire_ came he'd taught himself the quietest sounds, so when he wrapped his hand around his cock, he barely whispered.

He'll learn to be loud, will Siska. Months from now, years, for the rest of their lives Kostya will coddle him to noisiness, murmur him to moaning. When Agafya is away with her daughters, when the house is empty and it is just them, Konstantin will rejoice in the rumblings coming from his love's big body, and he'll find delight in delighting him to _volume._

Then was not now.

So Siska bit his lips but then no, no he wanted spit so he blushed and brought his hand to his mouth, licked his palm like Kostya had done last night when they thought they would touch each other again but instead fell asleep, only to wake each other soon with more whispers.

Like then Siska licked his hand, imagining it was Kostya's hot tongue, kissing the wetness right after and laughing because Kostya was so ready to find delight in that bed—

_regret tried to come back but_

—Siska rumbled his brain full of soft distraction, took hold of his erection again, slick now with Kostya-by-proxy and that made him smile, the first one of the night and that was good, it felt familiar, like _home,_ like something known, so Siska let his brain go fuzzy with that, stroke, stroke, stroking.

He remembered Kostya standing naked on the fireplace mantle to warm up his cold feet and there was the almost-faded darkness of the summer's sun on his hands and forearms, a faint V on his chest where his shirt would have been tugged open when he got too warm. It was months since then so his farmer's tan was a ghost only visible when you saw how pale he was everywhere else.

Francisco squeezed his eyes tight to hold the image of Kostya by that fire, a fairy of light, a halo of red hair, only imagination got jumbled, Siska forgot they hadn't made love yet, so in mind's eye Kostya by that fire _wet,_ body shining with their sweat and come.

"Nnngh." He bit his lips harder but the sound was there down deep because the Kostya he saw was slick and in need of _licking_ and would he have let him do that, let him sup there, on the wetness of them?

Siska spread his legs wider, grabbed a fistful of his own hair and it was Kostya stroking and pulling and saying "This is my body" against his mouth as he fed him. "This is my blood" as he flooded wine between his lips. "My body" Kostya said tongue hot and squirming, "My body" he whispered and—

Fist pulling, back bowing legs wide, wider, widest Francisco came across his stomach, into his bellybutton and that barked a laugh from him because he felt Kostya's tongue dipping there, hungry for the mess of them, feeding and fed.

Arms and legs boneless, empty of an old, old heaviness, it took Siska a sleepy while to wipe his belly almost dry, to pull the bedclothes to his chin, to vaguely remember this had started with regret.

It _would_ come back because Francisco was a consistent man (except those times when he wasn't), so he'd again know sorrow for running away, but for now he slid down under the covers because he hadn't bathed yet, hadn't _wanted_ to, and now the scent of them was strong again with the sweat and heat.

Morning was on its way and so many other things besides, but Siska pretended he was in a big soft bed with a slim warm man, and they had said all the words they meant to say.

Then, in his bed inside an old Russian house, the moon hung low in his window, a halo of mist around it speaking of a coming storm, Francisco Lorcán Murphy Garupe fell asleep.

He did not dream.

*

On the evening of the day after Siska left his farm, Konstantin Dmitrievich stood at his at his kitchen window and wondered if he still had his komboskini.

Given him by his grandmother when he was eight, it had been green, like his eyes she'd said. He'd been protective of the knotted little prayer rope all those years ago; he'd worn it round his small wrist like some sort of toy.

It was midnight by the time Kostya drew the curtains closed against the quiet, Agafya long since gone to her own little house. They'd spoken little yesterday and today, crossing paths only at his desk this afternoon as she filled the oil lamps. "It'll storm again," she'd said and left it at that. For a moment he'd wanted to ask if she knew where his komboskini was but felt shy, not wanting to see in her eyes what Siska said was there: knowledge. He didn't want to know she knew what he was and what he'd done, even though Siska had said there was something else there too, however gruff and silent:

Acceptance.

Moving through the kitchen's moonlit dark, Kostya promised himself he'd think those thoughts another time, just as he'd told himself yesterday that he'd go to the machine shed and see if the plows had been oiled like he'd asked. Just like he'd told himself this morning that he'd sit down at his desk and work on his book.

Instead, ever since the sledge with Siska had pulled away, he moved like a ghost in his own house and now mounted the stairs to his bedroom hours earlier than he usually did.

Once there he pulled on the nightshirt he'd leant to Siska, imagined it was still warm from his body, and crawled under the bedclothes.

Curling toward the window and staring at the low moon, Kostya muttered "I want to build a church," because sometimes he understood a thing better when he heard it. It didn't help though, he still didn't know if those were the words that had made Francisco go away, if they were the ones that had put such sadness into his eyes as he walked out the door on his way back to Dolly Oblonskaya's house.

"No, it is his sister," Kostya whispered to the moon, wanting to believe. Magda Garupe was why Siska had gone.

Because wouldn't a church be a haven for Siska, a home after all that had happened to him? His own House of God, tiny, perfect, with a frill of onion domes if he wanted them, just like the churches Kostya remembers from the villages when they would travel to Dubna.

"Was I wrong?" he asked the halo'd moon, but it didn't answer. Instead its brightness made him shiver, so he wriggled and kicked and grunted until he'd wrapped the bedclothes around his cold feet, until he cocooned himself in softness, until he'd twisted himself restless and hot and…

_Siska._

It might not be acknowledged in the aristocratic circles in which the Levins had long ago moved, but since he was young Kostya has understood the naturalness of desire. He's sat cross-legged at the edge of a meadow, watching a bull mount a heifer, seen a rooster drop his wings as a hen lets him climb her back, so there in the moonlight he was not at all shy about pulling the blankets over his head and pushing a pillow down between his legs, just like he used to do when he was a fourteen year old boy.

Tucking his nose into the neck of the nightshirt he that still smelled of his lover, he breathed deep and saw Siska, his black hair and big hands, his dark eyes and the wings of his collar bones. He saw Siska as he was last night—a strong sort of scrawny, like leather worn thin. He saw him sitting on the bed amidst their nest of blankets, waiting patiently for a tiny bite of pryanik, his mouth a open, wine making his lips red. He remembered how Siska had leaned closer and closer, growing eager, mouth wider, wine dripping sweet down his chin, firelight setting his eyes and cheeks deep in shadow.

Which made Kostya imagine Siska as he wanted him to be.

_Satisfied._

Maybe with rich food, with butter in his coffee and cream in his soups, wine from his lover's mouth, maybe he would grow fat, would Siska, maybe the sharp of his cheekbones would disappear under plumpness once he'd had _enough._ Or maybe he'd look like his brother Nicolai had as a young man, long before the tuberculosis, his back, his belly, his legs strong with muscle.

Like his own, Siska's scars would never fade Kostya knew, but he imagined a sweet face no longer bruised with denial, eyes bright with laughter, he imagined the gift of making Siska laugh, of making him moan, of bringing him pleasure and—

"Oh…oh…oh _god."_

Kostya sighed heavy, blinked hazy eyes open to the dark beneath the blanket, then breathed deep. The heat of his skin had sharpened the scent left behind on the nightshirt and it made him ache. Then he grinned.

About some things he's fastidious. Washing his hands well before eating every since that time he sucked sauce from beneath a thumbnail only to find it was blood and afterbirth. About his hair, his hats, and his cravats, because if he's to dress well, he means to _do_ it well. He is fussy about his letters, his books, and his boots, but Kostya is not fastidious about _everything._

So the wet pillow, well he wiped it liberally all over the nightshirt that still smelled of Francisco Garupe, of he wiped the wet here and there and _everywhere,_ because then he'd have them back, he would, yes.

"Siska," he said out loud because sometimes he understands something better when he _hears_ it, but not this time, no.

Downstairs a clock tick-tocked itself to a half-past midnight chime and Konstantin Levin fell fast asleep and he did not dream.

—  
_Here are some[small and not so small](https://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/190667011589/fic-sup-from-my-mouth-at-a-little-past-midnight) Russian churches. I imagine Kostya and Siska roaming the countryside come spring and looking, looking, looking to build something sweet, something small._


	18. Signs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Signs come, both big and small.

Kitty counts.

_Forty-four, forty-five…_

Her earliest memory is of counting daisies when the family went to Toulon the summer she turned six. Her sisters ran to the sea amidst their maman's calls of "Girls! Slow _down!"_ while Kitty stayed on the windy dunes, ribbons tied firm under her chin, counting tough-stemmed little flowers holding tight to the sand.

"Five and six!" she said, when only just that age herself, "one hundred and two" as a teenager, adding up the pearls on maman's necklaces, "forty-four, forty-five," woman-tall and counting waltzing couples during a dance.

So it was natural for Kitty to count now.

_Fifty-eight, fifty-nine…_

Though she sat right there on Dolly's sofa watching, Kitty didn't know if it was Magda who rocked Francisco, or Francisco who rocked Magda—back and forth, back and forth, a slow-slower-slowest tick-tock of comfort—but she did know it had been a full minute they've held each other.

Because Kitty counts.

Though she has always done that, a reflex she's never needed to understand, she _did_ give thought to other things she does that are much newer.

Last winter, beside a woman some called 'whore,' helping her bathe the body of her dead lover. Smiling when a Sochi landlady called her Anna's 'kitten.' Refusing to marry Konstantin when she understood he could not love her. Not _that_ way.

_Sixty-seven, sixty-eight…_

Just a year ago she was innocent of so many things. Of how hypocritical Anna's accusers were. Of the fact that sometimes men love men, women love women. Of the fact, yes she thinks it is a fact, that maybe some people, perhaps, best love counting daisy or pebbles or dancers.

Now that she's past the flurries of youth, believing herself in love with men like Count Vronsky or Konstantin Levin, Kitty finds herself inclined to the serenity of observation; happier to listen than to be listened _to._

_Eighty-two, eighty-three…_

Which is why she sits here, in the solarium of her sister Dolly's house, listening to a man and woman whisper their tears of reunion to one another, silently grateful she had even the smallest part in it.

_Ninety-six._

Magda Garupe and Francisco Garupe let each other go and Kitty stopped counting.

As if this were a signal, the entire house went suddenly noisy, the parrot squawked, a carriage rumbled, and two young children pounded down the stairs heavy as elephants, bursting into the solarium with shrieks.

"Give me back my pillow!" hollered seven-year-old Nikolai.

"No, she wants _my_ pillow!" shouted four-year-old Ludmilla, who ran out of the room again, followed by her now-crying brother.

And as if _this_ was a signal, two adults began chattering fast in Portuguese…

"—missed you—"  
"—came so far—"  
"—skinny—"  
"—sorry—"  
"—home—"  
"—love—"  
"—mam and papai—"  
"—left there—"  
"—when we didn't—"  
"—know—"  
"—stay—"  
"—gone—"  
"—Kostya—"  
"—Kostya—"

…and Kitty stood up, pretended she didn't understand that one word in their rapid-fire conversation, and mumbling courtesies, she went off to find _two_ now-crying children.

Then, as if all the word was suddenly one sign leading to another, the twins fell silent, foreheads together, and they did what they've always done.

Kept secrets.

Had you stood just behind either of them you wouldn't've heard a single word. Had you wrapped your arms round a shoulder and held your breath you couldn't've understood more than every fifth word so quietly could they speak. Though they didn't need to speak many.

"Everything love…" said Mady, saying _you deserve everything my dearest love for you have suffered enough._

Francisco shook his head, words trapped tight in his throat. _But I failed._

"We always said he wants love, didn't we?"

Even when they were children they pondered this that and everything. Did god really notice when a sparrow fell? Did he want his creatures to be happy? They were five years old, and ten, and then long before they were fifteen Magda absolutely knew love created love and that _that_ was what god wanted. The force of her conviction convicted Francisco, and so she reminded him. "We make the good god wants by loving each other." _Let your Kostya love you._

Francisco Garupe's body is littered with scars. Through a terrible year of hurt, hunger, and hiding he survived by dreams alone, not conviction. His faith died even before Sebastião had drowned and now, right now, here in the arms of his sister, he finally began to mourn all of that.

"Lela," he moaned, smearing a tear-slick cheek across his sister's, his thin body wracked graceless with sobbing, heaving up the sick of too much loss.

If Magda could have carried him off to safety she'd have done it, has done it when they were little and gravity couldn't hurt their still-tiny bones. Skinny arms wrapped around his skinny waist she'd pick him up and carry him to the creek that trickled back behind their house, dry dirt in the summer it flowed full of cold rain in November and they'd shiver themselves giddy playing in it.

Sometimes when Kiko would fall down, when mam would be cross with him, when he was sad, little Lela would pick him up and trip-fall them to the water's edge. Only once had she dumped him in, but every time after the delicious dread that she'd do it again would stop his sniffling.

_Oh what the hell._

Gravity was no longer kind to their tall, tall bones, but Mady put her arms round Kiko's waist—

_so thin too thin no no no_

—and picked her brother up, having absolutely no idea where she would go with him.

He twisted on instinct the moment his feet left the rug and just as quick as he was lifted he was put down again, and down, down, down they sunk to the floor, both too tired to hold up their grief any more.

Tears dripping fast Mady begged. "You were gone so long. L-let yourself _stay?"_

 _We missed you, we thought we lost you._ We mourned and wouldn't have moved far from that pain for the rest of our lives, but you're here Kiko, you're alive. We have you back and yes you're changed, but your _you_ is still here, the strong, wonderful heart of you is here please, please, please stay let this man you are now _stay._

"Remember Father Matos?"

Siska sighed his head to his sister's shoulder. Of _course_ he remembered the man who'd inspired his life's vocation, a vocation that had never been about churches really, it had been about—

"Bridges," Mady whispered, and Kiko nodded and held her tight because, though he no longer believes, no, Francisco is a Jesuit still.

When their mam's Irish grandparents had landed in Lisbon all those years back, they'd brought with them barely the skin on their bones, so perhaps it was understandable how hard they fought to hold on to the intangible possession of their Protestantism. Perhaps it made sense to them to turn away their granddaughter when she married her Portuguese husband and became Catholic.

It never made sense to Francisco, and he'd felt powerless in the face of his mam's longing for a family that would not forgive. Then he met Father Tiago Matos.

Just a little over forty, the Jesuit taught the boy, the teenager, then the man the beauties of ecumenicalism. He venerated research, cultural pursuits, helping those in need, but above all of these he believed in _education_ and how it could build bridges between faiths, cultures, people. Francisco's first mission was to follow Father Matos to Galway, were they helped begin what would become the Saint Ignatius of Loyola school.

"You're the bridge between who you were and who you are."

Francisco lifted his head from Mady's shoulder and it felt like it happened in the slowest of motions but it did happen. He laughed.

And the day, it just couldn't stop itself, because Francisco's laughter came at the same moment as a four-year-old's giggles, a little girl who slinked-slipped-crept into the solarium and, seeing her favourite person in the world slumped on the hearth rug, the big black-haired lady there with him too, well Luda giggled and jumped about like a sparrow in a field of worms.

"Ha ha ha here!" She said, thrusting her small blue pillow, stitched with white stars and fat sheep, out to Magda.

In the epic battle of whose gift would rest on the big lady's bed, Luda had won only by cheating. After Aunt Kitty had settled them in the nursery, after she'd explained who the lady downstairs was, and after Nikolai had distracted her with his wooden blocks, Luda snuck back on the tip tops of her toes and _took_ her blue pillow with the white stars and fat sheep and brought it downstairs. The moment Miss Garupe took the little thing and smiled at her Luda understood what twins were, because Miss Garupe looked just like her favourite person in the world.

"I love you," she said, grinning all her teeth, and hopping out of the room.

And that was the moment Francisco Garupe understood how to change everything.

—  
_As ever I'm glad you're patient with these tip-toeing characters in "Sup." I love them all to bits but they are careful, slow people. Thank you!_


	19. A Lot in a Little Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Much can happen in very little time, though it really does depend on who you ask.
> 
> (Otherwise known as Siska finds a new faith when Mady helps him find an old one.)

A lot happened in a little time, though it does depend on who you ask.

"I don't!"

For example, Kitty returned to her mother's and father's home.

"I don't _like_ it."

And Dolly and the children returned to Moscow from visiting Anna in Sochi.

"Back and forth and back!"

Grigorij and baby Mariya had to be put immediately to bed, weep-weary from so long away.

"It makes my heart sad."

And though tired too and disappointed she missed her sister's visit, Dolly learned much of its results.

"Dyadya Kostya should come here."

For Father Garupe was not in residence.

_"Here!"_

Which was not even a little bit okay with Ludmilla Stepanova Oblonskaya and her two stomping feet.

To tell the truth it wasn't even a bit all right with Magda Muiread Murphy Garupe either but, thirty-two years little Luda's senior, Mady understood well why Francisco had gone, and had been (mostly) glad to see him go.

So she diverted a big heart and a small one with a question. "Can you tell me about Dyadya Kostya's farm?"

Four-year-old Ludmilla rightly sensed a trick to distract her but, after three long side-eye seconds, she jumped eagerly in place and sang out, "Okay!"

And besides, even though she hadn't been here three whole days yet, Luda already knew Miss Magda was inclined to cuddling if she was happy, and since maman was upstairs resting now and nurse was with the baby, Ludmilla aimed to make Magda happy and get some cuddles.

"Okay! So. On the farm there are cows, a lot of cows and they make _milk!_ Like you drink? If you touch their things, their dangling things that I forget what they're called, they are softer than I thought they would be but the cows are so, so big!

"And! Also! There's Laska who is a dog and I love her because she follows me everywhere because Dyadya Kostya told her to, he said she's a sitting pointing dog and she would protect me."

While the child chattered in her rapid-fire French, Magda drifted to a fat chair by the solarium fire and, as if magnetised, Luda went too, taking up residence, hip-to-hip.

"Dyadya showed me the fields one time after the harvest and there were all these people everywhere and also these really big things called…" Luda scrunched her entire small face but couldn't remember the word haycock, so she waved arms _this_ big and _this_ wide. "And we got on top of one with a ladder one time and it was pokey but it was _warm._ Dyadya Kostya said that sometimes he falls asleep on them! I want to do that don't you?"

Magda yearned to see the farm, to meet Konstantin of the haycocks and the protective dog, she yearned to see her brother again, but it was she who did her best to send him away.

"Do you love him?"

They'd talked and talked and, because of all those words, in the afternoon of the second day a telegram was sent. Its reply came today and not an hour later Kiko was gone.

And despite their thousands of words, despite doubts and a body and mind in need of mending, Kiko had had one word to answer her question, so important to everything else.

"Yes."

After two long years without him it was a physical ache for him to be gone again so soon but, like her family, Magda cuddles those endeared to her and yes, this small, bold child—who loved Kiko too with all her tiny heart—she was already so very dear and so Magda and Ludmilla sought comfort in one another to soothe their sadness.

"And what else?"

Big of spirit but petite of form, Luda crawled into Magda's lap, a light burden. "Well there's a big garden behind the house"—arms were deployed again—"really _big_ and around it Dyadya grows pretty flowers. Maybe he'll give some to Siska!"

Magda's carriage journey from the train station had been long but sweet. Though Kitty knew little of Francisco—except that he was slowly growing well under Dolly's care—she still had so very much to share.

"We were engaged to be married once, Konstantin and I. Let me tell you about him."

And so Kitty had given away words. Ones Magda echoed to Kiko later, about a passionate man, a daydreamer, a worker, a man who tried to be good.

"Oh!" Mady's little burden became a squirmy one. "Dyadya Kostya told me he will have orange daisies all around it in the summer because I love them so much! I'll make a crown for you and maman and Nikolai and Siska and Laska too!"

It took most of the sledge journey for Kitty to finally share the most important words, softly but with strength. "Kostya's heart is big, and I promise he will love your dearest brother with all of it."

Mady wrapped her arms more tightly around Luda and whispered a smile into her ear. "What else?"

"Well…oh, I know! Miss Agafya makes us chak-chak! Once she made it in the shape of a bee because she uses the honey from Dyadya Kostya's beehives!"

Luda slid off Mady's lap in buzzing excitement. "I love bees, I love bees!"

Magda knew that avó had kept bees when Lili was small. When Kiko and she came along avó gave them up to care for the now-busier household.

"They won't sting you you know! What you have to do is just stand a bit to the side?" With Mady as the beehive, Luda stood beside the fireplace to make her point. "Like this okay? So they can get in their house!"

At the subtle sounds of her mother upstairs, Luda began bouncing on her toes. "And Dyadya Kostya said when I'm big I can help him get the honey! From the hives! Do you want to come?"

Mady smiled at Ludmilla's faith she would be in Russia when Luda was "big," but instead of answering the question she asked her own.

"Do you think it would be nice for Ki—for Siska to learn about the farm?"

Luda leaned her elbows on Magda's knees, tongue stuck out the side of her mouth.

"So he can love it as much as you do?"

Ludmilla Stepanova is only four. It's a selfish age, narcissistic and imperious. It's also full of cusps and little Luda teetered on the edge of one right now, ready to fall back on the certainty _she_ mattered most but…

…even a child can see _skinny._ In Ludmilla's well-fed world, where papa had a big belly, where people cooed over the baby's fat legs, in this world even someone very small could see a man with shadows in all the wrong places.

More than that, Luda had seen something no one else had.

"Can I see your outfit please Siska, please, please, _please?"_

She didn't even know what she was asking, only that maman and papa said _priest_ and she knew priests had special clothes and sometimes the hats were _this_ big and there were golden necklaces and so she wanted to see if Siska's clothes were pretty or if his hat was red and so she said, "Please, please, _please?"_

But it was all wrong.

He'd gone away to his room for a long time but when he came out, dressed in his "outfit" his black trousers and black shirt and white collar weren't like the vestments she knew so—

"I don't like it," she'd said soft. Everything looked loose and wrong; like Siska wore the clothes of a giant.

"I don't like it," she said again now, cheek against Magda's knee, little arms tucked under her as if being small would small her sadness, too.

As maman and the nurse and Masha bustled by full of noise, Ludmilla tumbled down the cusp, onto the side of selflessness.

"But it would be really nice for him to know. He could meet Talla, she's a cow, and Laska who is the dog, and have Miss Agafya's chak-chak. Maybe he can go on one of the big, warm things in the field and look at the sky like I did!"

Luda climbed onto the chair beside Magda again, and made two small index fingers dance in the air. "Did you know how bees fly? I'll tell you, because—"

For the next little bit of forever, Ludmilla Stepanova discussed bees and honeycomb and daisies and mud and dogs and baby poop and how to burn coffee on the fire and all the things she'd learned about Portugal and—

—Magda Muiread Murphy Garupe listened and fell a little bit in love.

Yes. Yes indeed, a lot happened in the little time since Mady had put booted feet on Russian soil.

She'd already learned to adore this tribe of children who loved her brother; their mother Dolly who had made it possible for her to come; and Miss Kitty who had given her words.

She'd been reunited with her Kiko, picked him up like always and in doing that put down a burden she'd carried for the last year.

She's had the precious time needed to whisper their old faith back into him, one they'd had long before they knew of god, the certain faith that good brought good. So if they walked beside the creek hand in hand just as mam said to do? They knew they'd always find frogs or pretty rocks to see. If they brought papai a big glass of watery-cool sangria in the garden? They would have handfuls of tiny sweet tomatoes to eat with cheese.

And if a man had faith in another man's love, well, he should love him back.

Oh yes, much had happened in no time at all.

Like Father Francisco Garupe remembering things he'd forgotten.

Riding in the sledge toward the farm—he smiled inside the collar of Kostya's wedding coat because already this journey was familiar to him—Siska couldn't recall when his childhood faith had left him but, now he had it back, it sat comfortable in his belly and chest, like something warm warding off the cold.

Francisco _did_ know that he was a liar, like so many are. His lies were the insidious kind, the little fibs and tall tells we all tell ourselves _about_ ourselves. These lies make it easy to shift the blame for the things we don't do onto an ill wind, a misunderstanding, or the words _I want to build a church._

Back inside the noisy silence he only ever knew with Magda, he could finally think in a way he hadn't done for years, _about_ things he had never done. Like falling in love with a man. Or…

…well, at least one he'd now done three times.

There was snow everywhere, when Siska lifted his chin from the coat collar his breath froze on his moustache, yet still he blushed hot right on up to his hairline.

Mouths and hands and moans twice that night and then again in the morning and the time between two and three? He could count that but he didn't because they fell asleep before anyone…before they…but it was that almost-time he's thought about the most.

With their whispers of "Here? Oh…there." With Kostya's voice, usually light with curiosity, passion, animation, gone so deep with murmurs, a rumble sending shivers up his neck and down his arms. With a full belly his own misplaced penance had kept hungry, even as he sat with the children when they ate the treats their father brought them. With muscles grown soft with sweet exhaustion, the kind that wouldn't let either of them sleep but neither would it let them come, yet they could still talk about it, talk—"Here. _Ooooh"_ —and touch.

The farm was past these two trees and over that wintry blue-white hill and surely if he opened the coat a little he wouldn't have an erection by the time the sledge arrived, but to be sure Francisco Garupe closed his eyes and thought of what he would say when he saw Konstantin again.

He probably should say _I'm sorry,_ and _thank you for letting me come back,_ and _I'm an idiota,_ but he wouldn't.

What he wanted to say, right there at the steps, before they went inside and before Kostya could speak, before _he_ could think himself stupid again, the very first thing Francisco wanted to say was—

"I missed you even before I knew you."

Siska looked to the sky and it didn't matter that frost started forming round his mouth, he whispered that again low, under the rattle of the horse tack, and he knew its truth because the place inside him that used to be empty was so full of a pale, gold angel.

Oh he wanted to speak poetry to this poem of a man, with his flame-red hair and loud laugh and long legs!

Francisco looked around wide-eyed at the white, white everywhere white and he _glared_ at it. _I have raised my voice to church rafters_ those fierce eyes said. _I have lifted my chin and quoted chapter and verse before samurai._

"I will whisper him proper poetry," Siska said to himself, poetic, and the sledge went down the other side of the wintry blue-white hill and the cluster of onion domes sat on the back of Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin's house came in to view.

"I will talk of an old faith."

But first, first, first, Siska really had to do something about his erection.

—  
_Ah. We come toward the final few chapters now, where love finds its way at last. And just a whisper in case you want it: I've started writing wee stories for "Coda," which will be tiny vignettes of their lives after this story._


	20. The First Age

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the bedroom with the white snowflake on the door the first age of the love affair between Francisco Garupe and Konstantin Levin begins.
> 
> But first there are memories, food, words, and there are _teeth._

The white bedclothes were splashed red here. And _here._ Here, here, and here, too.

They stuck to Francisco's back, wet with the sweet wine that drip-dripped from his mouth, down his cheeks, pooled first in his left ear—

"Hnnnnn."

—his right—

_"Hnnnnn."_

—and then Kostya's tongue pushed between his lips, holding him in place long enough for another gush of blood-hot port to pass from Kostya in to Siska.

He groaned and squirmed on the sticky sheets, arms wrapped tight across Kostya's back, legs round his waist, belly smeared with the come of his first orgasm, while Konstantin rocked on top of him, crooned to him, chased for him—

_"K…ostya. K…Kssstyaaa."_

—his second.

The soft keening stilled Konstantin, enthralled him, closed his eyes and turned his head so he could _listen,_ and it was the relief of it, the need-want- _have_ of it which brought Kostya to full hardness.

And stillness Siska for one second. Two. Three.

Then, in the room with the paper snowflake on the door, in afternoon sun filtered gentle across the bed, Siska reached a long arm, missed, reached again, found by touch the shallow bowl beside them and plucked from it a kotleti.

It was the sweetest of things to feel Siska's warm breath on his cheeks, see his teeth digging just deep enough to pierce the kotleti's soft-crisp breadcrumbs, holding it there between them. Goosebumps skittering down Kostya's spine as he lowered his head, and it wasn't until mouth pressed to mouth and they both bit down that Kostya moved again, his cock sliding slick in the mess on both their bellies, and it wasn't until another kotleti was shared between them, then a syrniki, then another and just…j-just…one…more that Kostya whimpered into Siska's mouth, cock pulsing wet between them.

The lassitude of orgasm would be for later, next week, next month, right now felt fragile and suddenly Kostya felt desperate. Before he went soft he sucked at Siska's lips, his moustache, his jaw, sticky sweet with wine, his arms, legs, _heart_ gone heavy with need and weariness, want and hope. "Don't go," he said, the words thick on his tongue, just as they'd been on the carriage road hours ago, where he'd stood to wait for the sledge bearing Francisco.

He hadn't said it then though, no. Instead he'd watched the familiar Oblonsky family carriage slow beside the lane leading to his house, and he forgot to feel awkward standing there in the snow, forgot to murmur the rehearsed pleasantries he planned in front of the old driver, and when the sledge turned and finally disappeared over the rise, he only said, "Agafya made us soup."

He'd been stomping his heavy boots on in the kitchen when she'd come in, pointed wordlessly to a pot on the stove. He'd taken his coat from the hook and started to ask what she'd made, but she'd scowled him silent. What it turned out to be was soup thick with beets and beef, cabbage and cream. On the counter there'd been more rich, heavy food: breaded kotleti, cheesy syrniki, bread and butter, wine too.

Food to put meat on a man's bones.

They'd eaten borscht alone in the kitchen, Agafya a noiseless shadow elsewhere in the house. Kostya asked after the Oblonskys, Siska replied, and two seconds later neither could have said what they'd said.

The bedroom with the snowflake on the door was fire-warm when they stepped inside, the bulky drapes pulled back so a low sun shone soft through white translucent curtains and across the floor in front of the fire.

It was there on the hearth that Siska set his bag down and then himself, waiting, waiting, still and waiting until…Kostya closed the door.

If it was sacrilege so be it, but Father Francisco Garupe called on the old strength then, the strength that had for years stood him tall in front of a congregation where sometimes, just sometimes, he had to admonish and chide, exhort and chivvy, where with a steady, raised voice he might demanded _better_ when thing were bad, sympathy when illness took the town by surprise, when women bickered in shops and men quarreled on the street. _That_ strength steeled Siska's spine, made him brave enough to stop _starting over,_ and remember he had made love with this man already, he'd bared his body and so _he would bare it again._

His shoes under the hill of his empty trousers, the trousers under his shirt, his shirt under his underpants and socks because those are the last things people take off, whether they are being brave or they are not. Soon on top of that pile of clothing was another.

Because Konstantin hadn't stayed by the door, no, he'd stood right there in front of Siska, toe nearly to toe and ridiculously close, and he'd shaken so prettily and _let Siska…_

_…do what he wanted._

The old farm coat, the linen shirt, the tattered scarf that had been his brother's, belt, trousers. Each item he let Francisco unwind, unbutton, open, push from shoulders or hips and dropped one, two, three on top of his own clothes, a sweetly silent, sartorial foreplay.

_…take what he wanted._

Kisses there by the hearth, by the bed, then beneath bed clothes and against necks and noses and mouths. Then touching Konstantin's hips, the small of his back, under the warmth of his hair, Siska whispered himself frantic in Portuguese.

_…have and have and have._

Neither of them know if Francisco's body will _always_ be so hungry for pleasure, they only know now that he comes easy that first time, and is ready so ready breathless ready, arms and legs wrapped _tight_ ready, to chase a second orgasm.

_…let him sup._

It will never matter for Konstantin how long it takes Siska that next time, not if he can feed him. So he smiled in the soft light, dragged the wide bowl of kotleti and syrniki onto the bed and one, two, three they found their way from Kostya who rocked to Siska who squirmed, cocks growing fat, then fatter still as Kostya fed Siska wine from his own mouth and the mess _really_ started then.

Through it all, Siska's first orgasm, his second, through Kostya's, through feeding and being fed they murmured and whispered, they hushed themselves quiet.

Because Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin's household includes a housekeeper and a cook, a driver and a handyman, and though each has a place of their own on his land, all come and go as they need, almost anywhere, anywhen. And though every bedroom door has a lock, even so the new lovers surrounded themselves in cathedral quiet, created the sacred through silence.

Come summer though, oh come summer they'll learn Francisco Lorcán Murphy Garupe, is not a quiet man and that that broad body is made for chesty moans and lusty laughing.

Come summer they'll tromp the fields at midnight, the air sweet with mown hay and earth, looking for the perfect haycock up which to clamber. Then, in moonlight a blanket'll be spread on the packed-tight hay and through the night and with not a soul near, they'll make noise.

Right now though, in the warm, ridiculous, fragrant wreckage of food and their pleasure, legs draped, arms wrapped round backs and necks, Siska pushed his face into the splash of Kostya's sun-bright hair and breathed "Thisss," hot against Kostya's neck, "this was the first thing I ever saw in Russia."

There's been so much stopping and starting between them in these tender first days of intimacy and, knowing about himself that _he_ is always ready to speak of the heart, Konstantin only hummed softly, hoping his silence created space for words.

It did.

Breathing deep the scent of soap and sweat in Konstantin's hair, he said "It was because of Luda that I even looked."

Kostya smiled and the feel of Siska's smile against his throat, then—

"Eep!"

—he eeped at the unexpected thrill of teeth biting soft.

"My duty was to the children so I never paid attention to who came and went from the Oblonsky home." Siska began dreamily twirling a lock of red hair round his finger. "And I couldn't see anyone anyway, do you see? For the longest, longest time all I saw was rain on reeds, the sea slapping against—" Francisco's eyes shone with tears. "I didn't know how to see anything else."

Siska stuttered a sigh, then kissed a lock of Kostya's hair.

"Then one day Ludmilla said dyadya was coming, and she said he was _so_ very kind. She said he might bring her flowers from his garden, that sometime they were orange like his hair, and did I ever see orange hair?"

Francisco closed his eyes so he could see. "Then you were there, by your sledge beneath the window of the nursery and I looked for just for a moment and…"

_and  
_ _and  
_ _and_

Fingertips brushing meditative-slow over a red, red beard. "And your beautiful hair was the first thing I could truly see after…"

_Japan._

As the words came, one small and eager part of Konstantin's brain memorised the semaphore of his own blinks, the quirk of his own lips, so he would know for next time and next the way to encourage Siska to _keep talking._

Drawing a deep breath, only a little shaky, Siska kept talking. "You stood with Dolly there in the sunshine by the sledge and the only other thing I remember was that you gestured with the flowers…were they daisies?…to the other nursery window and the sun… made you so, so bright that I dreamt of you for weeks after. I think I did. Maybe they were day dreams. Maybe they were wishes."

Silence fell and one second, two, three, Siska's gaze went dull. It was then Kostya added to blinks and quirks what would become a true and steadfast support to his love.

"GAH!"

He tickled.

It was an inelegant sound and _loud_ and they shushed each other's laughter with hasty hands, then tongues against palms, then teeth biting fingers, then kisses, kisses, hands-holding-heads _kisses_ that morphed into biting again, Siska's teeth nibbling chin and Kostya learning—

"I like that."

—so Siska sucking his lips pink, soft-bit them red, hiking his leg high over Kostya's hip, a thigh pressing soft-hard against a soft-hard cock.

"Why did you do that?"

Distracted by the erection plumping down there between Siska's legs, Konstantin thought he wanted to know why he'd opened his mouth— _because I want to suck you—_ then realised it wasn't that at all.

"What? Oh. It looked like your memories were sad."

Siska thought about that, then whispered confidentially, "The children and I went downstairs. I think I tried to teach the children something but I watched you when you came in to the solarium." Francisco's high cheekbones went scarlet as he asked Kostya's teeth-swollen lips, "Did you see…us?"

The Russian summer had lasted long this year, warm and bright for so long that the growing season seemed forever. Over the long months he'd more than one time heard gossip about the priest who now lived with the Oblonskys, snatches of his sad story badly told by those who relish relaying misfortunes. By the time Kostya had had time to visit the family, remembering Stiva's description of the priest—shoulders, handsome, big—he was _much_ more than curious, so of course he performed an elaborate pantomime of disinterest.

Then Dolly took them in to the solarium and sat him by the fire and across the room _there was fire._

The fire of a pale face offset by so much black hair; the fire of big hands reaching out from a black coat, and when Dolly came back with…with…Kostya couldn't remember what she'd come back with, only that his face was hot and his hands were cold and suddenly Dolly was talking about the dark and—

"No, no I didn't," Kostya said, and pressed Siska's finger to his mouth as if to silence a lie. He smiled against them and said, "Just you. Just you. Just you."

Kisses again then, against the pads of fingers and palms, against the heartbeat in the soft skin of a wrist, against the tender hollow inside both elbows. Kisses to the notch at Siska's throat, to collarbones too prominent, to the hungry muscles there beneath the broad chest.

Siska wouldn't come again, no, but lovemaking was much more than coming, so Konstantin pushed away the low, wide bowl mostly empty now, and he kissed Siska everywhere he was warm, everywhere he loved, everywhere.

And there, in the bedroom with the white snowflake on the door, the first age of the lifelong love affair between Konstantin Levin and Francisco Garupe began.

—  
_Still a chapter or two more; please let me know what you thought of this one. By the by, this is[a haycock](https://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/614486792087945216/sup-from-my-mouth-the-first-age-in-the-bedroom)._


	21. A Chink in the Armour of Custom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here they sat on a straw-strewn floor, Kostya straddling Siska's lap in the dim shadows of a warm hen house, listening as Siska talked about things that don't matter, explaining and confessing, and all of it just so much…so, so much… 
> 
> "Uuuuurr." 
> 
> Yes. _Chicken shit._
> 
> "Oh Siska…"

Siska looked up in the hen house's shadowy light, murmuring, "—and I complain a lot. I try to stay quiet but never very hard."

Perched beside her sister on Siska's ankle, Blue _uuurred_ at these words in hennish negation; straddling Siska's lap Kostya echoed her.

"And I am vain and fretful and talk too much about things that bother me."

The chicken fluffed her feathers, Kostya puffed out his narrow chest, and both made more mouth noises of disagreement.

"I just worry you find charm in a man who is not very charming when he is well."

Well, that was _it._

Blue hopped off Siska's ankle and chicken-pranced around the warm hen house, gratitude for apple skins he'd brought her an hour previous gone to hell in her fit of pique.

Konstantin was even more showy in his disagreement, frowning in the sweet half-light, pushing black hair back with both hands and dotting _no, no, no_ kisses on Siska's forehead.

At the base of a small hill back behind Kostya's garden, which itself lies back behind the house, the chicken coop is almost out of sight of both. When Konstantin left their bed in the half-light of dawn this morning—

_Don't go._

—to dress and talk with a tardy carpenter, Francisco had watched his long limbs disappear under layers of wool, watched his face become harried. Right after he left Siska with a kiss, Francisco rose and, not knowing he was going to do so, he went downstairs to put a tiny chink in the armour of custom.

Agafya Mikhailovna does not know the French he and Konstantin share and Siska doesn't yet speak enough Russian, so to the housekeeper Francisco he smiled unashamed and proceeded to speak in the only language they shared: he flapped his arms and clucked. For a good five second Agafya side-eyed him, then frowning a smile she opened a low cupboard and handed out the egg basket.

He'd chattered to the chickens as he spread their scraps out in the coop did Siska, then dawdled his collection of two eggs inside the hen house. Finally he'd sat himself on the wood floor for Blue to perch upon and an hour later Kostya found a sleeping man on whose long legs sat Blue and Hark and Gett, feathery-fat.

They hadn't planned this round-about way to find time alone together, and through the years they won't speak much of such benign subterfuge. Not because they deny they have to hide who they are, but because Francisco Garupe and Konstantin Levin each believe in…well, call it quiet disobedience, civil disrespect, silent _fuck yous_ to the social order.

Neither man is a fool though, and one is scarred by the price paid for ignoring customs. Yet there are chinks to be made in the armour of convention, toeholds of dissent to be found in tradition, and always it's been the women and men who wedge a word in here, an act in there who, over time, help make love what it should always be.

_No one else's god damned business._

So here they sat on a straw-strewn floor, Kostya straddling Siska's lap in the dim shadows of a warm hen house, listening as he talked about things that don't matter, explaining and confessing, and all of it just so much…so, so much…

"Uuuuurr."

Yes. _Chicken shit._

Which Kostya won't say because clearly Siska needed to say all of _this._ And what was this anyway? A warning? Repudiation? Was all this supposed to change Konstantin's _mind?_

At first he didn't respond when Siska went quiet, waiting to see if the silence would settle or if there were more self-effacements on their way. After Blue clucked her boredom, Kostya finally spoke.

A polished man would've reassured his new lover, an urbane man would've whispered sweet praise. Konstantin Levin however did both of those better.

"I already knew all that."

In a world which disapproves of them, in one which they'll sometimes be ignored and other times watched too close, this is what Kostya and Siska will give one another in abundance and sometimes right in front of the scandalmongers and petty gossips: words upon words.

"Before we said a single word to each other, I knew."

Blue fluffed herself pleased.

"The very second time I saw you…" In the half-light Siska's teeth flashed in a grin. "…you were an immovable wall between Stiva and Tatiana, do you remember?"

"—surely the card game can wait until your daughter is asleep Mr Oblonsky?"

Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky had gaped at the priest, and though the man spoke to him church quiet, servant solemn, there was no mistaking the black _wall_ of him. Thin as a rake he might be but he was an unblinking barricade Stiva did not even _think_ of pushing past.

Instead Stiva stammered 'of course' and 'certainly' and squatted down with a tut-tut of endearments for his daughter. The child clutching Siska's hand reached out and Stiva scooped up the fevered five-year-old who'd been pleading for her papa, and took her to the nursery. He stayed with Tatiana until her fever broke, until she was deep into dreams, and his card game long past pointless.

"Dolly had to prod me three times before I looked away and put down a card." Siska's grin grew and in the half-light Kostya echoed it. "Then there was that novel…"

Since he could remember Francisco had always bitten off more book than he could chew, starting a long ago summer night when he'd pulled down from a tip-toe shelf Lili's heavy volume of fairy stories. Though it was in Irish, he'd glowered through with his hundred words of Gaeilge, until papai had scolded him for reading in the dark. So had it gone with one of Dolly's books, reading in the rainy light of the solarium, neither knowing that he was frowning fiercely at the novel nor that he clutched a fistful of his own hair as he did so, Siska finally got so grumpy with both the story and his poor Russian that he snapped the book closed with a sneer when one of the children called.

"Every time I've seen you read you scowl like you're waging war with the words."

Siska bent his knees, displacing _one, two, three_ sleepy hens, and Konstantin rested snug against this more intimate perch.

"My favourite though, was how you'd make yourself pretty."

The Oblonsky household is beset with mirrors, like so many hand-me-down aristocratic homes. A scrollwork one age-misty _here,_ one crazed with fine cracks _there,_ another and another between sconces, on tables, at sideboards, so no matter where in Dolly's house Siska might be, when he'd hear Konstantin's voice there was almost always a mirror nearby to primp before, smoothing down his hair and checking his teeth, pressing his collar flat, never realising his reflection was so often _reflected._

Kostya cupped Siska's cheeks. "How did I know you were doing all that for me?"

Hands at Konstantin's waist, Siska pulled himself forward, opened his smiling mouth for a kiss. But a kiss he did not get.

Yet.

"So you tell me about your vanity and fretfulness, and I'll tell you I already know. Just as I know you hide food you don't like in your pockets—yes, that time Stiva insisted you have a candied lemon rind, and the time Luda gave you a crab apple. I also know you don't like to get your hair wet in the rain, and when you're upset you stare, unblinking, until my eyes water in sympathy."

Kostya leaned whisper close but still there was no kiss. "I know most of all that neither of us are perfect, that we'll bicker, we'll hurt and be hurt. But."

Close as he was Kostya knee-walked that tiny inch closer, until chest pressed tight to chest and into the warmth between their mouths Kostya said, "I don't care, I don't care, I don't _care._ Do you want a litany? A list? Shall I confess on my knees to you all the things _I_ am Father? I'm grumpier than you could ever be. I'm pedantic and often self-righteous and those are my gentler qualities. I hate being hot Siska, and never shut up when I am. I can be a fussy eater or I'll gorge like a dog whose just stolen a plateful of oladyis from the table. I forget to bathe for days Siska because I'd rather write my farming book which I'll never likely finish."

Konstantin had helped his father build this chicken coop which sits back behind his garden. They'd given it Byzantine angles and a golden onion dome, they'd painted it jewel blue and white because they both loved Assumption Cathedral, and though the paint had faded the colour of winter skies, though the dome long since lost its gilding, the storybook structure was still a snug little nest for twelve chickens and for new lovers who needed time and quiet—

"Uuuuurrrr."

—to say some of what needed saying.

"I'm imperfect, impertinent, and once upon a time I thought I would never fall in love because I couldn't and, after all, who would fall in love with me? A skinny man with orange hair and dirty nails?"

This conversation had started before the sun was all the way up, just before the carpenter came, Siska finally finding the courage to sigh out sad admissions. "I'm so sorry," he'd said apropos of Konstantin's whispered endearments, hypnotised into bravery watching his own thumbs stroking Kostya's hands. "Please do not build your church if it's for me."

How to put into a few sentences a lifetime of faith gone cold, embers doused. To talk about religion which no longer gave comfort? How to voice worries of _worth,_ of—

—and that was when the weeks-late carpenter set Laska to barking with his knock and though Kostya wanted to stay right in that bed listening, the roof needed fixing.

"Of course I want it for you, but only if _you_ want it," he'd said hastily rising from the bed, like the words were nothing, not knowing Siska had been sure rejecting the offer would be some great tragedy.

Now here they were with a dozen dozy chickens and a polished man, an urbane man, well he'd have tut-tutted Kostya's dirty nails self-deprecations, oh yes, but Francisco Garupe is neither polished nor urbane.

So though his biology is sometimes that of a boy lately, though the warmth and weight of Kostya's ass in his lap had him soft-hard, instead of tilting his chin again for that kiss, Siska leaned forward for the sweet, wet little benedictions Kostya pressed to his forehead again and he said "I love you," between kisses fourteen and fifteen, and unsaid was this: _Pedantic I will love you. Fussy and frowning, too._

Except no, absolutely no, unsaid had to be _said,_ so as kiss twenty pressed at his temple, and twenty-five to his ear, as kisses rained against the high curve of his jaw, the side of his nose, the top of his head, under a soft storm of kisses Siska said, "I will love you when you are well and when you are sick I'll love _that_ you, too. I don't know who we will be next year or tomorrow, but I want to be with that man if he wants to be with me."

Konstantin kissed Francisco's eyelids and his laughing tongue and somehow up his right nostril. Where his lips went his tongue soon followed and it'll be years before Siska grows blasé about that tongue's animation, about the way Kostya licks the air when he feeds him from a shared spoon, how that tongue wriggles when he wants Siska's ass. The day Siska forgets to rejoice in that tongue is not this day, so he laughed and lifted his face to its slick and messy baptism.

Blue uuurred at all the jostling and Kostya giggled. Then laughed. Then he threw his head back and _cackled._ Like his tongue, it will be forever before Siska fails to notice Konstantin's laugh. He'll be eighty years old, the hair on his head long gone, his beard white, and still Kostya, his Kostya with a headful of grey hair fringed with red, will be cackling away. Maybe because their newest old dog keeps farting, or Siska still can't turn over a softly cooked egg, or because his own cock is lying lazy in a haywire of grey pubes, unwilling to rise even though it's their anniversary.

Finally Kostya caught his breath enough to throw out his arms and whisper loud, "Siska! Siska! _This_ is our church!"

That future fifty years hence, with the old dog and the broken yolks, the one where Kostya _will_ eventually get it up (once they hear the young men in the hotel room next to theirs, two sweet young Harlem boys they'd met in the club downstairs), even then Francisco will notice nearly every single, glorious cackle.

But now, right now Konstantin's joy is different because he's laughing at a fine truth and he's breathless now to share it. "Do you see? _This_ is our church Siska, this lovely old chicken coop my papa and I modeled on an old church I loved as a child, this is our holy place all right? Would you mind that terribly? If it were?" Konstantin bounced on his knees like the little boy he'd once been. "I'll paint it for you Siska, I'll gild its dome again!"

Back when he believed every scripture and each verse, when he was a Jesuit down to his bones, devoted to learning and teaching, saving and being saved, Francisco had reckoned that nice as cathedrals were he loved more the places that _worked_ for the people around them. Churches that were part of the warp and weft of a city or a town and what could be more functional than a house of worship that was…well, a house.

For hens, but still.

 "I'll sand down the walls for you, I'll clean all the paint from your hair!"

They grinned with their plans which they would absolutely fail to carry through. Because soon winter would become spring-busy, and every hour not taken up by the farm would be devoted to learning day-by-day-by-hour how to love one another in both silence and out loud. To be sure they will come often to this straight-sided coop, with its jewel colours faded dusty, but they'll come to collect eggs and rake straw, mend nesting boxes and posts. They will not paint it pretty, instead they'll down tools sometimes (or only pretend to use them at all) and lie on fresh straw in the shelter of hen house shadows, drape themselves close and comfortable, and they'll talk about anything and everything.

It is surely very true that some of those times Siska will talk entirely too much about how this year's wine gives him indigestion, he'll be fretful about his graying hair, or complain about an aristocrat's muttered slights, it is also true he'll sometimes roll onto his belly as the sun goes down outside and woo Konstantin to slow desire with a gentle hand stroking down his throat and into the collar of his shirt. Siska will suckle a nipple budding behind cloth, and he'll tell the man he calls husband that he's more beautiful than today's sunrise. Francisco will nibble an earlobe to goosebumps and a neck to a fast pulse and, like now, like right now with snow on the ground outside but safe and snug inside, he'll notice Kostya's mood move mercurial across his face, his eyes closing when he feels Siska reach for his belt.

Sliding his big hand into Konstantin's trousers and underpants, Francisco cupped Konstantin's balls, the heel of his palm pressing firm at the base of his cock. He went still then, until Kostya clutched at the curve of his big ears.

Still he stayed still, did Siska, smiling beatific, so Konstantin opened his eyes, grunted and rocked, tiny pushes, not much, because Siska was right _right_ there, between his legs, chin lifted to sup little breaths from his mouth. "Sssss'ka," he laugh-groaned when Francisco caught his licking tongue, sucked it into his mouth, delicious little pulls that made Kostya's skin prickle with adrenaline and heat, almost uncomfortable. He'd never been this way, so hungry to sate a man's hunger, so happy to be the food upon which he fed.

_This is my body…_

Kostya sighed, blood gone to syrup in his veins. He felt dreamy, distant, like he was lost again in one of the endless day dreams he'd have after they met. Reveries where he'd kiss Francisco's mouth and neck, fantasies where his hands would be on Siska's skin.

"Ssssss," he sighed, all the name he could muster with Siska nursing on his tongue and—"Nnnnnnn!"—oh wasn't that thought to triple his pulse, fat pearls dribbling from his cock and down, down to slick Kostya's hand. Siska _nursing_ from him from mouth or nipple or cock, impossible but not and _right there_ he grunted, _stay there_ he squirmed, but Francisco _didn't,_ because he understood already how to tease so he did but only a little, pulling away for a moment before coming back with the apology of a moan and teeth scraping Kostya's tongue, then there was another thing, one maybe they'll be shy about for a week or three, but turns out they both have it, the hunger to sate and be sated, so Siska made soft, childish noises of contentment, as if _feeding_ from that tongue in his mouth, and _that_ was _that._

Hands fisting in black hair, Kostya whimpered through his orgasm, riding the heel of Siska's palm frantic and hard, a mess of come smearing between them, all over black wool and somehow up Siska's sleeve.

Counting kisses pressed to the fast pulse in his neck, Kostya rocked gently on the erection beneath his ass, but Francisco _hmmmned_ his disinclination to come. Instead he wrapped his arms tighter round Konstantin's waist and kissed that thrum-thrum pulse until it slowed.

It was in those taffy-pulled and tender moments after that Hark flapped, she clucked, and then she went and cackled the announcement of an egg.

Konstantin and Francisco fell over laughing.

*

Sometimes Agafya will notice how long it takes the men to collect eggs, and sometimes she won't. The carpenter or a peasant or Stiva will sometimes see Levin's hand fiddling at the priest's collar and sometimes they won't. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes there will be frowns or suspicions or shrugs, but always, _always_ bread will need baking, a roof will need patching or a cow milking, and what people think they know will be easier to forget than to _do_ something about.

Kostya won't build a church for Siska but there will be many altars upon which they share communion, and through the years this straw-dusty floor is one. People will know and not quite know who they are to one another but they and others like them will find chinks in the armour of tradition. The process will be slow and fifty years from now in a swanky club in Harlem they will be old men watching young ones kiss each other in public and they'll welcome changing times.

Things won't have changed enough yet, no, not outside small smoky clubs in big, brave cities, but they _will_ change.

That will be then. Right now Siska smiled and found his nose soundly kissed. He smoothed Kostya's hair and the man he is said something sweet, then the Jesuit he is no longer said something smart.

"I love you Konstantin.

"Can we build a school?"

_—  
_ _New York City in the roaring twenties saw an upsurge in LGBTQIA nightlife, and I wanted Konstantin and Francisco to be a brief part of that. That they are silver-haired? Well, that's for Altocello. The beauty of a chicken coop sort of made like[Assumption Cathedral](https://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/617111743306530816/sup-from-my-mouth-a-chink-in-the-armour-of-custom)? Well that's for me. Next chapter was supposed to be the final one, but maybe it's the penultimate one? Meanwhile, thank you a thousand times for loving these boys. P.S. Here's the sound of [chickens uuuurrring](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYq14rSwePk)._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading and loving these boys too. I'm on [Tumblr](https://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/atlinmerrick) if you'd like to say hello!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Siska's Seraph](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23636137) by [altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/altocello/pseuds/altocello)
  * [Kostya's Heart(h) {art}](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23685532) by [altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/altocello/pseuds/altocello)
  * [Siska's Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23778112) by [altocello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/altocello/pseuds/altocello)




End file.
